Twelfth Night has always occupied an uneasy place in Shakespeare’s performance history, remembered widely as a festive comedy, yet its every production must reckon with a lingering melancholy in its content. A shipwreck on the high seas sets off the chain of events, family grief hangs over Lady Olivia’s household, Malvolio exits promising revenge, Olivia’s fool Feste closes the evening with a song about rain. The Australian Shakespeare Company’s production at Kew Gardens does allude to this shadowy contradiction, but it does not dwell on its shadows and instead opts to spend much of the play’s runtime revelling in Illyria’s carnival, beginning with a bang and a nod to the play’s origins with their own themed rendition of the carol “The Twelve Days of Christmas”.
Having toured Shakespeare for nearly forty years with remarkably compact ensembles, the Australian Shakespeare Company possess the sort of chemistry that only comes from working together over long stretches of time. Actors launch into one another’s arms without hesitation, pepper each other with kisses, declare all-consuming love before immediately dissolving into laughter, feed each other scraps of food, pour wine into shoes, and stage an elaborate gag involving someone pretending to urinate on a box while another actor desperately hides inside. The comedy is gloriously physical, less like performers chasing laughs than friends delighting in how far they can push each other’s ridiculousness. Kew Gardens proves an ideal setting for this playful energy, where birds interrupt speeches and the wind catches costumes.
That spirit of collective play extends well beyond the obvious comic scenes. Shakespeare’s Illyria is built on performance:
- Viola performs Cesario till the truth stares back at her with his identical face. Elizabeth Brennan’s Viola has an understated intelligence and adheres to the fundamental wisdom that acting is reacting as she shifts posture and confidence depending on whether she is navigating Orsino’s emotional theatrics, Olivia’s increasingly transparent infatuation, and so on.
- Olivia performs mourning until desire interrupts the script. The brilliant Nicole Nabout is a delightfully impulsive Olivia, making the audience see the plausibility of a woman’s commitment to seven years of mourning getting thrown out the window after a single conversation. An Olivia that does not so much fall in love as short-circuit.
- Orsino performs romantic despair with theatrical devotion. Hugh Sexton’s Orsino wisely avoids the trap of straightforward romantic heroism and really goes for the character’s almost comic narcissism, savouring every melancholy declaration with the satisfaction of someone who enjoys performing heartbreak.
Elston’s production very much leans into the fact that performance itself is a great big joke. The cast have infectious confidence in one another’s comedic timing. The drunken subplot surrounding Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Maria, Fabian, and the unfortunate Malvolio unfolds with effortless comic momentum, trusting Shakespeare’s elaborate practical jokes and involving audience members at every opportunity. Jackson McGovern, Tony Rive, Maddie Somers, and Henny Walters are unstoppable — especially in getting the audience to joyfully sing along to their party tunes. There is soul and music aplenty in this production, courtesy of Paul Norton. If music be the food of love. They laudably go above and beyond to commit to the most vulgar cartoonish displays, to the audience’s constant thrill.
Where the production occasionally loses its footing is in the emotional register beneath the comedy. In Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, C. L. Barber argues that Twelfth Night never simply begins and ends in celebrating misrule. After all, carnival is exhilarating precisely because it is temporary. The disguises have to come off. Someone is invariably left standing outside the celebration. Every production has to decide where it sits within that tension. The ASC’s latest staging firmly backs the carnival.
Now, Maverick Newman’s Malvolio provides the evening’s finest comic precision; the wet blanket Malvolio is funniest when he has absolutely no idea he’s in a comedy. The yellow stockings sequence is predictably hilarious, but Newman also preserves something more uncomfortable beneath the laughter as he earnestly succeeds in winning the audience over to his side. Barber’s festive outsider briefly reappears in Malvolio’s final exit, reminding us that someone always pays for everyone else’s good time.
As another point of critique, Viola’s grief over Sebastian doesn’t get enough time nor gather enough weight given the magnitude of what she’s been through. The jester Feste (Alex Cooper) is played as a bard with a guitar that operates more as a genial master of ceremonies than the mildly unsettling observer who watches the play’s disguises fall apart. It is a remarkable pity that shipwreck and presumed bereavement, being the play’s emotional foundations, are often swept aside in favour of the next comic set piece.
The final scenes therefore feel a touch too light and abrupt. Malvolio’s bitter departure arrives and recedes rather quickly before the production hurries back towards celebration. This is a suitable choice for a raucous outdoor summer production, albeit one that slightly diminishes the peculiar aftertaste that makes Twelfth Night linger so persistently.
The Australian Shakespeare Company favours warmth over ambiguity, which ends up occasionally at the expense of the play’s stranger, sadder currents. But credit where credit is due: beneath the revelry remains a play about people searching for versions of themselves that other people might love. The cast’s chemistry gives the inhabitants of Illyria exactly what they needed: the sense that identity, desire, and joy are all things best discovered in the company of others.
Kew Gardens
★ ★ ★ ★
Written by William Shakespeare
Directed by Glenn Elston
Music directed by Paul Norton
Choreography by Sue Ellen Shook
Cast from the Australian Shakespeare Company
Running time: 2 hrs including 20-minute interval
Until: 30th August 2026