WIf you have often asked yourself why a song that is not so happy in itself as the final song “For the rain it raineth every day” ends “What you want”, this perhaps most bitterly angry comedy by Shakespeare, you don’t get much smarter in the current production in Vienna’s Kammerspiele in der Josefstadt. After all, Maria Bill as the sad clown sings various songs beforehand, mostly in tango rhythm, mostly in Italian or Spanish. In any case, the German versions are all printed in the program booklet for the performance. Certainly not meant to sing along! At least on the night of the premiere nobody dared to do that.
The director Torsten Fischer and the dramaturge Herbert Schäfer (the latter was also responsible for the stage and costumes together with Vasilis Triantafillopoulos) immediately took on a new version of the Shakespeare text and brought a rather exciting version to the rather small stage. Of course, the basic framework remains intact.
The twin siblings Viola and Sebastian are separated in a shipwreck off the coast of legendary Illyria, washed ashore, rescued by different people and immediately involved in more or less elaborate love intrigues without knowing about each other. Orsino, the Duke of Illyria, has his eye on Countess Olivia, who, after heavy family losses, does not want to hear about marriage proposals. When Viola, now called “Cesario” because she feels safer as a man in foreign lands, wants to deliver Orsino’s message to Olivia, she falls in love with her. At the same time, the Countess uncle Sir Toby, his drinking buddy Sir Andrew and her maid Maria are having fun with Malvolio, their ambitious, well, in this version: butler. You know how it all ends – it’s worst for Malvolio and the clown.
There is only one woman on board
Plays the original “Twelfe Night, Or: What you will”, written around 1601 (a first performance is noted for the beginning of 1602 in the diaries of the English lawyer John Manningham) in an astonishingly cheeky way with gender roles and status clichés, fishermen and shepherds build this into the Kammerspiele even further. As is well known, no actresses were allowed to enter the more prominent stages at that time, so men played women’s roles. Which, in Viola’s case, might provide additional entertainment.
Here Maria Bill is the only woman on board, but in the role of a fool. All other characters, male or female, are portrayed by men. Claudius von Stolzmann, for example, plays Duke Orsino, mostly with his upper body bare, but he definitely feels attracted to “Cesario”, i.e. Viola, who in turn is played by Julian Valerio Rehrl. The situation in Olivia’s house is similar – Martin Niedermair, as the countess, also becomes “Cesario”, and towards the end she is married to Sebastian (of course played by Julian Valerio Rehrl). It all works fairly well and, most gratifyingly, while highly entertaining, yes, hilariously funny at times, but never by poking fun at the confused gender roles.
gold right
And then there are the drunkards! In the Fischer-Schäfer adaptation, they empty countless glasses, yes, whole bottles of whiskey and insult each other and everyone else rudely – they were already abusive with Shakespeare, but not quite as badly. Allied with housemaid Maria, who has Alexander Stromer deep in his bones, whether it’s vacuuming or screwing Malvolio, Robert Joseph Bartl as Sir Toby Belch and Matthias Franz Stein as Sir Andrew Aguecheek have been credited with some of the best performances of the evening. Possibly aimed at the audience of the Kammerspiele, who are traditionally more than fifty years old, they appear as extremely convincing copies of Laurel and Hardy, right down to the voices and the bowler hats. With a younger audience, that would possibly lead to identification difficulties, but for this venue one can only call out to the director: spot on!
The ingenious highlight is the parody of a legendary dance performance by the British-American comedy duo. For this effort alone one can wish the production many sold-out evenings. In any case, the premiere audience thanked them with thunderous, long-lasting applause.