Shake

121329 original

Wish you were here? Well don’t. French company Eat A Crocodile’s production set at a seventies seaside resort is Twelfth Night by another name, and doesn’t smell nearly as sweet. It’s a turgid, torpid retelling, and an unfortunate howler for the International Festival.

Five beach huts, peeling and brown, stand side by side on stage. Five actors play all the roles and pop in and out of the huts with much slamming of doors and swapping of wigs. But far from the frenetic end-of-the-pier entertainment it wants to be, it comes across as a farce with no pace. Long, indulgent interludes—songs played in full, tired "doctor doctor" jokes told by the Fool, dances that serve no purpose except padding—stifle the energy.

Director Dan Jemmett has populated the resort with larger-than-life characters, so Sir Toby Belch is a ventriloquist and Sir Andrew Aguecheek his dummy. Everything is deliberately overacted, the cast attempting comedy but rarely succeeding. The only exception is Antonio Gil Martinez’s doubling as Duke Orsino and Malvolio, the latter a rasping, sneering comic book character with big glasses and false teeth.

The impression one gets is that it’s constantly playing for time, so that the actors in the beach huts can change into the next costume. The result is something slack, lethargic, a self-aware production that wants to be experimental, that wants to be funny, but falls short in both attempts. It’s Punch and Judy Shakespeare with all the vim of an out-of-season seaside town.