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Stylish and surprisingly sexy, in the style of a Pierre et Gilles photograph or a Jean Paul Gaultier perfume ad, Owen Horsley’s production leans heavily into the themes of sexual and gender confusion in Shakespeare’s play. His staging is witty and seductive, only marred by an almost willful lack of pace.
Here, Raphael Bushay’s bluff and uncomfortable Count Orsino, white-uniformed as an officer and a gentleman, goes to woo the lady Olivia (Anna Francolini) not at her house but at the smoky, nautical-themed, midcentury-modern gay club that bears her name, where she is patron and doyenne.
Her uncle Sir Toby Belch (Michael Matus) is the blowsy, boozy, in-house drag queen. Her fool Feste (Julie Legrand) is the wry, croakily androgynous singer and host.
Shipwrecked twins Viola (Evelyn Miller) and Sebastian (Andro Cowperthwaite) are washed separately up at Olivia’s door, the former dressing as a boy to enter Orsino’s service, the latter with an adoring mariner already in tow. Dressed in taupe, wide-legged trousers and abbreviated matelot jackets with flowing ribbon ties, they both look like supermodels. Hello, sailor!
The idea of role-playing is prominent. Francolini’s Olivia is first seen ostentatiously grieving her late brother, but she becomes performatively kittenish when smitten with the disguised Viola, and vampily joins the onstage band for one of the show’s nine musical numbers.
She’s dressed throughout in the kind of outfits Vivienne Westwood might have made for a young Barbara Cartland: younger readers may want to feed this information into an AI image generator, though I’m not responsible for the results.
Francolini’s is a grandstanding comic performance, which means she’s robbed of pathos at the end. Matus’s fag-chewing, corset-straining Belch is nicely paired with Matthew Spencer, resembling a young and shiny-suited David Cameron as Olivia’s hapless suitor Aguecheek, and Anita Reynolds’s mischievous Maria.
The fussy diction and secretary-bird superciliousness of Richard Cant prove a perfect fit for Malvolio, the arrogant steward they cruelly dupe.
Both Miller and Cowperthwaite give their characters emotional depth and sensual punch. There’s a lovely moment when a confused Orsino almost kisses the woman he believes to be a man. Legrand’s singing is more characterful than tuneful as Feste, but a fracture boot and cane only add to her swagger.
It all looks gorgeous. Designer Basia Bińkowska gives us a club with porthole doors and a brutalist conical ceiling, like a concrete martini glass, surmounted by a neon sign flashing hot pink and acid green against dry ice clouds as twilight draws in. Did I mention that the costumes are fabulous?
But man, does this show drag sometimes. You spend the first half amused, intrigued, and sometimes delightfully wrong-footed but wishing Horsley would just, please, hurry things up.
The second act is pacier but the ending is interminably distended. If your cast are expressive rather than splendid singers, a post-bow encore that pushes the show close to three hours really isn’t a good idea.
Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, to June 8; buy tickets here