Twelfth Night - GCSE Revision Notes

GCSE REVISION NOTES

Sample Essay

"Why, we shall make him mad indeed"

Directing the ‘dark room’ scene (Act IV scene2)

There's a great deal in Twelfth Night about madness. People often talk of the play as though it were a revels play - perhaps because of the association of its title with the Christmas festival. But, for all of its comedy and charm, I see it as very much darker than that. Like so many of Shakespeare's plays, it's about what happens to individuals when their idea of themselves prevents them from taking in the reality of the world around them. They act irrationally, lose their sense of proportion, become - in a way - unbalanced. And what happens to Malvolio is an obvious example of this. He takes himself too seriously, makes enemies by his insensitive handling of other people, and then is too insensitive to realise that a trick is being played on him. His vanity and self-importance are too great for him to react sensibly to the forged letter. And to Olivia, unaware of how he has been duped, his behaviour seems as crazy as that of a real madman: ‘Why, this is a very midsummer madness’ (III.4.56).

Perhaps that exclamation of Olivia's is what gives Sir Toby his idea for what follows, the imprisonment of Malvolio as though in a madhouse cell:

Come, we'll have him in a dark room and bound. My niece is already in the belief that he's mad. We may carry it thus for our pleasure and his penance till our very pastime, tired out of breath, prompt us to have mercy on him; at which time, we will bring the device to the bar, and crown thee for a finder of madmen.
(III.4.134-140)

Deciding quite how to set about staging this ‘dark room’ scene is a problem for actors, directors and designers alike. An audience will have divided sympathies when Sir Toby's plan is put into effect. Malvolio is humourless and unlikeable; yet his enemies' treatment of him seems monstrously unfair and out of all proportion to what he has actually done. For the director, as well as for the characters, it's a question of getting the balance right.

The idea of being taken to a dark place and physically confined was quite typical of the way a genuinely mad person might be treated by the Elizabethans, as it happens: their attitude to madness was much less sympathetic than nowadays- much more rough and ready, less squeamish. But the idea of staging a scene that focuses on someone locked up in a dark room has its special problems for a director. He or she has to decide how much or how little an audience is going to be able to see of the character.

The stage directions for the ‘dark room’ scene (IV.2) all imply that Malvolio is out of sight - he is described as speaking from ‘within’. In an Elizabethan theatre he might have been speaking from behind a curtained recess, or from a trapdoor beneath the stage, and one way of playing the scene in a modern theatre is to put Malvolio under the stage, with just his hand appearing through some grating. This means that the actor playing Malvolio is expressing the whole dilemma of the character with his right hand and index finger. It's quite an effective way of doing it. In fact, it's the idea we first started out with, in rehearsals. But more and more productions are tending to try to find some way of putting Malvolio on stage. After all, the actor playing Malvolio only has five scenes altogether - it seems a bit of a shame for him to be physically absent from one of the most important ones. And my Malvolio had a strong preference for being up on the stage rather than under it.

Deciding to have Malvolio on stage for the scene creates another set of problems, though: because the text makes it very clear that he is not able to see Feste at all. If you do what some productions do and simply box him into some sort of on-stage prison - a kind of telephone kiosk without windows - and have him shouting from inside it, then you might just as well have left him under the stage. The audience will not be seeing any more of him. I3ut if you bring him on stage suffering from some other kind of confinement - in a straitjacket, maybe, or even in a wheelchair - then he is also going to have to have his hat jammed down over his eyes or be blindfolded, so as not to see Feste.

Once we had decided that our Malvolio was definitely going to be on stage, we began first of all with the idea of his being blindfolded. Then, as we started rehearsing it in that way, we came up with the idea of his being chained to a post, just as bears used to be in bear-baiting. It fitted in with the suggestion we wanted to give of his being the victim of a cruel sport, of being tortured like an animal. And it also fitted in with the dialogue between Fabian and Sir Toby at the beginning of Act II scene 5. You find out then that one of the reasons why Fabian has a grudge against Malvolio is because he told Olivia that Fabian had been bear-baiting: `You know he brought me out o'favour with my lady about a bear-baiting here' (II.5.7-8). And it's interesting that Sir Toby's immediate response to that is to suggest that Malvolio himself should be baited like a bear: `To anger him, we'll have the bear again, and we will fool him black and blue' (II. 5. 9-10). That seemed to me an important visual image.

After that, once we had decided on the bear-post, one of the two actors playing Malvolio and Feste - I don't remember which - suddenly said, why didn't we actually set the scene in the dark room itself? We could let the audience see Feste descending a ladder, to make it quite clear that he was going down to join Malvolio in his prison cell. And that would mean that both. of the two characters would be in the dark: neither of them would be able to see the other. There would no longer by any need to blindfold Malvolio - the room would be in pitch darkness.

That made a lot of sense. It also provided a way of explaining something that's always puzzled me, which is, why - if Malvolio cannot see him, and they are not even in the same room together- does Feste bother putting on a disguise to pretend to be Sir Topas? Why wouldn't it be enough just to alter his voice? If you have them stumbling around in the dark together, then of course it's .more logical - Malvolio would be bound to reach out his hands in the direction of a voice and perhaps feel the false beard.

So we decided that we were going to set the scene actually in the dark room. That meant, of course, that we had to re-think what to do with Sir Toby and Maria, who are normally on stage for the first half of the scene. Originally, we had planned to have Sir Toby dancing around behind Feste, taking great delight in what was going on, with Maria egging him on. I3ut now, instead of that, we decided to place the two of them up at the back of the stage, looking down from a tiny lighted window. We would have them embracing each other, kissing each other - clearly enjoying listening to Malvolio's distress and even seeming to get a perverse kind of kick out of it.

Staging the scene like that - with Sir Toby and Maria up at the window - gave us another way of reminding an audience that the action on the main stage was taking place below ground level. But it also gave us the chance to suggest something rather unsavoury about Sir Toby. One thing I'm sure of is that he's not the loveable ne'er-do-well that he likes to think himself. In fact, no one in Twelfth Night is quite what they seem or wish to seem! As I see it, he is an irresponsible wastrel who exploits everyone around him - Olivia, Sir Andrew and even (given their relative social positions) Maria. People often claim that his line in this scene: ‘I would we were well rid of this knavery’ (IV.2.66-67) shows that he's starting to feel sorry for Malvolio and guilty about what's going on. I have never seen it like that. He's a hugely insensitive man: why would Malvolio's suffering upset him particularly? Isn't it much more likely that he's simply getting worried about his own skin at this point? He's already in dreadful trouble with Olivia over the drunken revels. The trickery is all bound to come out sooner or later. He knows he had better not take it too far.

With the staging of the scene getting clearer all the time in our minds, we then started rehearsing in earnest. It involved a good deal of practice with blindfolds or in blacked-out rooms, as the actors playing Feste and Malvolio each learned how to play a sighted person who can no longer see anything; and it involved a great deal of discussions, for instance, about the sorts of fears one would have - of sharp objects, of falling down holes - and of the odd sensations that one would experience in touching something unexpectedly. And we learned a lot about the way the human voice changes in that sort of situation. It becomes higher, far more restrained in a strange way. But by far the most important thing to come out of those early sessions was an entirely new idea about how the scene itself might best be presented on the stage.

Up until then, we had been planning to play the scene with the stage in near-total darkness. We had been planning to deal with it naturalistically. Then suddenly someone remembered the Black Comedy idea. Black Comedy is a play by Peter Shaffer that takes place in darkness. But instead of being in darkness, the stage is in fact brightly lit - so that what the audience sees are people behaving as though it were completely dark. I suppose it’s rather like those TV wild-life documentaries that film foxes and badgers by night with an infra-red camera so that you can wat.ch what they are doing, even though normally you couldn't see them in the dark. Anyway, this technique seemed a perfect solution. Instead of dimming the whole stage, we would flood a certain area of it with dazzlingly bright light to delineate the dark room. Both Feste and Malvolio would have their eyes open. But it would be clear to the audience from the very first moment - by the way that they moved around the stage - that neither of them was able to see a thing. Every moment they made would be choreographed carefully.

The use of light in this way would heighten the farce of the scene. But it would also heighten its cruelty. Not a single wince or grimace would go unnoticed. Like so much of the play, there is a blend in this scene between humour and horror. Malvolio is not really mad in this scene. Nor - despite Farina’s hopes does he go mad at this point. He hangs on desperately to his reason, and I think most audiences respect him for that. But there is still a certain 'mad' quality about the scene - in its snatches of song, its disguises, the sudden debate about Pythagoras and wildfowl. And the use of bright light to represent darkness would be one way of underlining that bizarreness.

It would also give an important continuity to the way I had already decided to use lighting in the production as a whole. As I said at the beginning, I see the play as being partly about what happens when people lose their sense of balance. I wanted to stress in my production some of the links between love and madness. And I wanted to show people behaving in ways that are extreme, or deluded, or uncharacteristic - slightly `touched' perhaps. It was the thought of reasonably ordinary people behaving in ways that could be thought of as slightly `touched' that gave me the idea of setting the play in a hot climate. Even though the action takes place nominally in Illyria, the characters could hardly be more English. And I thought of that Noel Coward song, 'Mad Dogs and Englishmen Go Out in the Mid-day Sun'. I wanted a sense of the intense Mediterranean heat that can go to people's heads. So the stage set was rather like a Greek island - white-washed houses, bright blue skies. A lot of people said it reminded them of pictures of Mikonos. And the lighting was deliberately strong when people's behaviour was at its most illogical.

We set the letter- scene (II.2) at siesta time, for instance the idea being that, instead of being sensible and lying in the shade or in the cool of his room, Malvolio is pacing around under the hot sun, with his mind going in a really bizarre direction as he fantasises about marrying Olivia. The people watching him are safely at a window, in the cool. He's alone in the heat. And the bright white walls of the buildings around him give the audience a visual suggestion that Malvolio is in a lunatic asylum all of his own, surrounded by white walls. Strong light becomes equated with madness. So by setting the `dark room' scene in a cube of white light, we could not only recall that earlier scene but intensify its effect.

I mentioned earlier that we did not see Malvolio as at all mad when we worked on this scene. The situation might be mad. The world he lived in might be mad. But Malvolio himself was wretchedly and earnestly sane. That was part of the power of the scene. His state of mind in the final scene, though - when he's led back out into the daylight barefoot, dishevelled and shielding his eyes from the sun - seemed to us quite a different matter. He leaves the stage finally with the departing line, ‘I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you!’ (V.1.375). When and if that revenge came, would it be the action of a sane man or a madman?

For other notes which may be of use to you, see my Home Page.