Sarah Clough, Simone Ellul and Chris Galea played multiple parts in What You Will – A Sea Dog’s Tale.

Theatre
What You Will – A Sea Dog’s Tale
St James Cavalier

Reworking Shakespeare can be quite challenging when faced with opposing factions of purists and detractionists – the former demanding that the performance stay true to the original in script, style and dress, while the latter label it as passé and ‘too difficult’, unable to attract and connect with a modern audience.

Striking the right balance can often be difficult as innovation runs the risk of falling into either the trap of the sensationalistic or appearing rather overdone. What Griffin Theatre Arts, in collaboration with the Malta Arts Fund at St James Cavalier, have managed to do, is to take one of Shakespeare’s best-loved comedies, Twelfth Night, and successfully weave the plot into another.

As a retelling, aimed at a young audience, the piece opens not with the play at all, but with the very enticing, if somewhat all-too popular, concept of an Elizabethan ship’s crew who are desperately badgered by a young Will Shakespeare to take him on as a resident sailor/writer.

Shakespeare (Chris Galea), eager to experience life at sea and draw inspiration for his plays and writing, is allowed on board and joins in the storytelling of the captain (Phil Coggins) and his crew (Sarah Clough and Simone Ellul) as they tell him the story of the Shipwreck of Illeria.

What was such fun about these performances is that as they enacted the parts, the crew mocked each other, not taking themselves too seriously, by joking about their props box and developing their own quips and private jokes around their life at sea. Thus, this play within a play dispensed with the more plot-like scenes of Shakespeare’s original text, recounted the plot to Will and enacted only the most crucial and enjoyable of scenes and speeches, resulting in a potted version of Twelfth Night which was quite entertaining.

Twelfth Night lends itself so well to retelling because its plot carries equal parts of the improbable

What also made the piece more interesting was its ship deck-like set, whose sails served as screens for visual artist Alison Shaw’s stop-motion videos and shadow theatre tableaux, forming part of the storytelling process while also combining elements of Will Buckman’s graphic design.

Twelfth Night lends itself so well to retelling because its plot carries equal parts of the improbable – with separated twins, a shipwreck, mistaken identities, roguish characters, elaborate tricks and love triangles, for the crew to poke fun at the plot and characters, while subtly making implications about the theatrical process as they went along.

What each actor did was a very skilled round of character doubling, playing multiple parts, with all playing Maria at some point, in different accents.

Galea’s Shakespeare and Sir Toby Belch were particularly fun to watch, with the Bard portrayed as a young, inexperienced but enthusiastic landlubber, and Belch as the uncouth, irreverent drunkard that he was.

Captain Thomas and Malvolio, as interpreted by Coggins were another two characters whose personalities stood out as both humorous duffers and rather self-important men, while Clough and Ellul’s sailors were hidden, but occasionally emerging in their respective roles as Viola/Cesario and Olivia.

The cast’s adaptability and genuine fun with the piece, as well as their liberating use of a more raucous, rolling version of English – which was probably more realistic and close to the pronunciation of the Elizabethan original, according to linguist David Crystal – made the piece quite enjoyable, in spite of its falling into more profuse textual performance in the second act.

What You Will was sadly under-attended for such a good performance and was a good launch pad to introduce a younger audience to Shakespeare.