The Australian Shakespeare Company is excited to soon set Melbourne’s summer nights alive with Twelfth Night, one of Shakespeare’s most beloved and mischievous comedies.
Seasoned writer, director and actor, Peter Houghton, plays the disagreeable but multi-layered pompous steward, Malvolio.
” Malvolio is an iconic character of course, one of Shakespeare’s most famous comic creations… or so we’ve come to understand,” says Houghton. ” Sometimes the aura around a role and it’s playing history can somewhat obscure the reality. Whilst Malvolio is indeed a brilliant comic creation, Shakespeare also gives us a true portrait of the middle man in culture. Hated by those ‘below’ him for his martinet habits, and patronised and spoken down to by those above. Modern viewers will recognise the Butler archetype, a servant with pretensions whose entire sense self-worth is based on what he thinks is the love of his employer – Olivia. He believes that his service elevates him and that she has a special place in her heart for him. Shakespeare had a special place in hell for these types – I suspect his father may have been something of a fawning bureaucrat and he clearly didn’t like that trait… but he also had a degree of sympathy for the man. Malvolio is complex, and that’s both fun and exciting to play.”
As with many ASC productions, Twelfth Night is directed by the company’s Artistic Director, Glenn Elston OAM. Houghton says he first worked for Elston way back in the early 90s, in his iconic production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
“I don’t think I was very good – that was thirty years ago unbelievably! I hadn’t done a lot of Shakespeare at the time and was still learning, we always are. I got busy doing other things and Glenn got me back to me a few years ago to play Claudius in Hamlet. Since then I’ve done quite a few of these ASC shows. It’s lovely to get the call in early summer to know you’ll be busy doing what you love in the beautiful setting of the Botanical Gardens, paid and in great company doing some of the greatest works ever written for our medium. It’s a joy.”
Houghton credits Elston with being a very funny and gifted man who has, for many years now, run Australia’s most successful independent company.
“He employs more actors per year than most of our State Theatre Companies and does this without government support” says Houghton about Elson’s almost 30-year involvement with the ASC. “His operations are Australia wide as well as his London seasons. It’s extremely impressive. We most often see Shakespeare today in hallowed theatres decked with red carpet and fancy accoutrements. But in Shakespeare’s day the plays were done largely in the rough – on bare boards in open air with very minimal design. The relationship with the audience was not muted by lighting – it was direct, conversational and immediate. A couple of years ago we did Merry Wives of Windsor, a play about suburbia versus the old order essentially. And I had the privilege of playing Falstaff, another iconic role. I’ve been acting since I was a teenager in the mid 1980s and I’ve always understood the principle of soliloquy. But with Falstaff I understood viscerally for the first time, just how immediate that conversation could be. It’s that conversation that really interests me. It’s almost totally absent from contemporary playwriting, unless it’s just the rather more simple form of ‘direct address’ or verbatim. But the true soliloquy is a different beast – it’s far more communicative and conversational and full of questions. All Glenn’s productions focus on that immediate relationship. He will work consistently to always find ways of engaging directly. It is the secret to the success of the company. The plays are not just ‘performed’… they are truly shared.”
Despite having written his last play over 400 years ago, Houghton believes the continued success of Shakespeare is that he is always relevant.
“In every age since his death there have been critics, usually claiming he couldn’t have been a lower middle-class guy from the country, or that he’s irrelevant or part of some systemic form of thought control etc etc. Even after his death there was a period when he went largely unperformed, as new artists in a supposedly smarter age wrote him off as a ‘folk’ writer, who wrote unwieldy, ramshackle plays that tinkered about with mixed poetic styles and high and low forms. He was accused of literary inconsistency, plagiarism, opportunistic low comedy… usually by ’smarter’ university educated men who thought they knew best. But Shakespeare always has the last laugh. It’s the very imperfections and roughness of the work that means it’s always ready. He was a master of language and it’s emotional relationship to thought. He was intuitive, entrepreneurial, practical and visionary. But for me, his greatest skill (along with his language) was his close understanding of human nature. His collected works are my bible to be honest. There’s no human foible, political folly or self-delusion he hasn’t brilliantly exposed. He was a wise man in an age of fools. And audiences have always known that. Because broad audiences are less tainted by the fashion and whims of academia. Audiences respond to emotional truth. And Shakespeare always has and always will deliver on that expectation.”
Certainly, weather dependent, along with other challenges, Houghton says when performing outdoors the directness is everything, the living environment, the weather itself, the sounds and smells. He concedes the audience is also in a different mode – eating and drinking often, relaxed and up for a different experience of theatre.
“I love to rib them, cajole them, have fun as they see themselves reflected, let them get ahead, sometimes jump ahead of them – constantly surprise. It’s very live. As we know from the various drafts of Shakespeare’s works from quarto to folio and the various other quarto versions we have, the plays were not set in stone. There was always room for the audience. When his good friends published the works in the First Folio they poured concrete on the plays and formed our perception of them in many ways. The motivation was understandable – they loved their friend and they wanted his work memorialised. But Shakespeare himself was far more mercurial I suspect. And the productions would have been alive to the moment. In the gardens the environment is always alive – owls and bats flying over, sounds of passers by, the occasional drunk yelling something. If you ignore all that, the show is no longer live. And when those things are acknowledged the audience adore it – they know that they are seeing something absolutely live and for them only.”
Houghton is both a highly lauded and accomplished director and actor and says that both disciplines help each other.
“The necessarily objective mind of the director is a very useful additive to the necessarily subjective role of the actor,” explains Houghton, who is clearly in love the process and craft of acting. “And vice versa. There’s few happier places for me than spending time amongst a troupe of actors. Actors are largely immune to the nonsense of our age. I’m not talking about virtue signaling movie stars or ‘leaders’ who feel the need to advertise their morals like 16th century puritans. I’m talking about the working actor – a person who tries on other personalities for a living. The experience of jumping in and out of other perspectives as a trade creates empathy of course. But also an awareness that many of the postures we adopt (that might loosely be described as ‘personality’) are really plots of convenience to help us survive in a world full of the same tribal issues of belonging, ostracism, faith and love that have always attended the human condition. Whilst not always articulated by actors it’s this basic awareness of human duplicity and complexity that make the craft what it is and actors who they are. Our theatre, with it’s feet in ancient Greece, privileges argument over decision and our greatest works show dilemma rather than easy answers. Hamlet is often seen as the pinnacle of the dramatic craft for that reason. The answers to most situations are never simple. And those attracted to simple answers are often devoid of that understanding. So I love actors for that reason. Shakespeare was right to privilege them in the craft – ‘They are the abstract and brief chronicles of our time.’ By this he meant – it is the very abstraction and the nature of the brief interlude of time we spend on this planet (mirrored by the miniature universes we present on stage) that makes life so confounding. The religious impulse in my view is an understandable attempt to order this miracle of abstraction – it comes closest to the truth when it gives the devil his due. Good theatre tells it how it is. And the actor is the cypher through which that confusion is played. Shakespeare’s most famous theatre was less than 50 metres across… but it was called the Globe. It’s our job to encompass all humanity, not just the bits we like.”
As an actor, Houghton loves playing characters with contradictions. Things that don’t add up.
“If as an actor you find yourself saying about your character – “why does he do this, over here he said this, we should change the line…?”… then you are about to make a mistake. Contradictions are everything – we should look for them, not eliminate them. In the political realm for example we are often confused by a message with value coming from a politician or party we don’t agree with. And so we’re tempted to reject it because of the messenger. Similarly with artists who’ve disgraced themselves we are unsure what to do with their work. The same might be said of our entire political system. In the arts you may hear a theatre company or art gallery making public statements that align with your values, but then see their work and find it disappointing, didactic, predictable and boring. This is largely due to the fact that doctrine doesn’t make good art, because it lacks complexity. To add to this problem our media will often feel the need to support it because of its messaging, thus perpetuating a feeling amongst ordinary audience members that they’re being gaslit by the arts, being told that mud is gold. So, in terms of thematics I like mess… and from mess, attempts to find order. That’s how I feel life is.”
Set against the moonlit backdrop of the Royal Botanic Gardens, the story spins a whirlwind of tangled loves, mistaken identities, and outrageous characters – all seemingly determined to turn everything completely on its head.
Twelfth Night continues the company’s much-loved tradition of Shakespeare Under the Stars – a night where families, friends, and first-time theatregoers can enjoy the timeless wit, romance, and mischief of Shakespeare in one of Melbourne’s most beautiful outdoor spaces.
Says Houghton, “This production will look for all the highlights of the play and deliver them with enormous energy and fun. You’ll also find in my view, Shakespeare’s best comedy. Twelfth Night is the most symmetrical of his plays and its revelry is matched by its soul. The sadness, grief and depth of the opening is balanced with the mischief of its plot. For those of you who may have come across the recent film Hamnet, which deals with the death of Shakespeare’s son and the possible evolution of that disaster into the creation of Hamlet the play, it’s worth knowing that Twelfth Night was his next work, about a household hauling itself out of grief on the Twelfth day of Christmas to find new life, new beginnings and new love.. always disguised of course, as something else. As a play to see in a new year it reminds us that love is eternal, hope is always there, and accidents and disaster are not just the end of things, but the beginnings of others. When Viola drags herself from the surf after that shipwreck and asks “What country friends is this?”… I get shivers up my spine… What country indeed. Her question is answered somewhat by Orsino’s first line – “If music be the food of love, play on…”… as an argument for art there’s none better.”
January 24 – February 28
shakespeareaustralia.com.au
