Music is much more than the food of love in Filter’s frenetic Twelfth Night at the Tricycle. It is the engine that powers an excellent stripped down 80 minutes. Six actors deliver Shakespeare’s play with such verve and energy that it is difficult to remember that what you are seeing is not the entire text but ‘the best bits’ accompanied by elaborate soundscapes constructed by the cast in collaboration with the onstage musicians.
Speakers, microphones, mixing desks, keyboards and consoles litter a stage that looks and feels like a late night jamming session to which the audience are invited. Viola borrows clothes from an obliging chap in the back row for her Cesario costume and some lucky ones at the front get to eat pizza, dance with Sir Andrew and drink tequila with Sir Toby in a riotous drunken ‘catch’ that builds from a single whisper.
It is hard to decide whether Oliver Dinsdale (as Sir Toby) steals the show from Ferdy Roberts (as Malvolio) or vice versa but both Filter’s founders are well supported by Jonathan Broadbent’s boundless energy as Orsino and Sir Andrew. Poppy Miller’s doubling is also excellent, especially considering that Viola and Sebastian share the stage for the last scene; she solves this issue with barely perceptible but impeccably precise changes in the inflection of her voice.
It is tempting to describe this sort of work as ‘unlocking’ Shakespeare or ‘making it relevant for young people’ as if these 400 year old scripts are a thorny problem that only multimedia can solve in the 21st century. That would be unfair to Filter: theirs is an excellent production of Twelfth Night, which gets the most out of the many musical scenes already in the play. Give me excess of it.
