Collected Reviews of Trevor Nunn's Film, Twelfth Night
The Dark Pleasures of Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night
by PETER HOLLAND, Director-Designate of the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, England
Why don’t filmmakers like Shakespeare's comedies? Look for an interesting version of any of the best-known tragedies, and you are spoiled for choice. Try doing the same for any of the best-known comedies, and you will still be searching weeks later. The astonishing 1935 Warner Brothers A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with James Cagney as Bottom and Mickey Rooney as Puck, is available again on video, but there is not much else. Perhaps that explains the huge success of Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing: it had little competition.
Branagh’s film has much in its favor, of course, but for those of us who find Shakespeare's comedies dark and troubling, Branagh’s glossy confection of spun sugar, with its relentlessly feel-good style, left us feeling more than a little cheated. Perhaps filmmakers really do like Shakespeare's comedies and, because they like them, know that it is going to be frighteningly difficult to get that strange blend of tones onto film and so abandon the uphill struggle. Adrian Noble's disappointing new film, a version of his successful stage production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, suggests that when the going gets tough, it might sometimes be better simply to give up.
But Trevor Nunn’s Twelfth Night is cause for hope. Surprisingly, Nunn has never directed Twelfth Night in the theatre. His fascinating introduction to the published screenplay for the film is a story of disappointments: of stage productions that never quite happened and of the endless compromises that making the film necessitated. That introduction explains much, not least why the pre-credit sequence showing the shipwreck that divides Viola from Sebastian is accompanied by a curious commentary in fake Shakespearean verse; like the problems with the movie Blade Runner, the studio's money-men decided, after a test screening in
by PETER HOLLAND, Director-Designate of the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, England
Why don’t filmmakers like Shakespeare's comedies? Look for an interesting version of any of the best-known tragedies, and you are spoiled for choice. Try doing the same for any of the best-known comedies, and you will still be searching weeks later. The astonishing 1935 Warner Brothers A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with James Cagney as Bottom and Mickey Rooney as Puck, is available again on video, but there is not much else. Perhaps that explains the huge success of Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing: it had little competition.
Branagh’s film has much in its favor, of course, but for those of us who find Shakespeare's comedies dark and troubling, Branagh’s glossy confection of spun sugar, with its relentlessly feel-good style, left us feeling more than a little cheated. Perhaps filmmakers really do like Shakespeare's comedies and, because they like them, know that it is going to be frighteningly difficult to get that strange blend of tones onto film and so abandon the uphill struggle. Adrian Noble's disappointing new film, a version of his successful stage production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, suggests that when the going gets tough, it might sometimes be better simply to give up.
But Trevor Nunn’s Twelfth Night is cause for hope. Surprisingly, Nunn has never directed Twelfth Night in the theatre. His fascinating introduction to the published screenplay for the film is a story of disappointments: of stage productions that never quite happened and of the endless compromises that making the film necessitated. That introduction explains much, not least why the pre-credit sequence showing the shipwreck that divides Viola from Sebastian is accompanied by a curious commentary in fake Shakespearean verse; like the problems with the movie Blade Runner, the studio's money-men decided, after a test screening in