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Twelfth Night
Yorkshire Post:
Whenever an outdoor Shakespeare company programmes Twelfth Night, a wry smile must play across a director's lips.
Shakespeare, English summer and Feste's eternal line "The rain it raineth every day" almost always provide a perfect comic moment.
So it was at Ripley. Sprite Productions' annual venture came to a wet and cold climax on Wednesday with Jack Whitam's Feste singing the line through a mist of increasingly heavy rain.
And the cast battled bravely on. Refusing to be cowed by the elements, the production company staged the full version, performed in promenade with the audience following the action around the grounds.
Little wonder the production team refused to be defeated by rain: the brains behind Sprite know they are on to a good thing with the grounds. Shakespeare's most famous stage direction might be "exit, pursued by a bear", but how much more beautiful is "enter Viola, rowed across a lake in the grounds of a castle"?
Director Lucy Kerbel is gifted with magnificent settings, which she uses magnificently. Shakespeare's comedy of mistaken identity is stripped down by Kerbel, who allows the text to work its magic.
When you have the setting such as this, there are few pyrotechnics necessary with the script – let the language do its job.
The actors who benefit most from this are Alex Barclay, whose Malvolio is not quite so sneering and snarling as he can be and an absolutely scene stealing Philip Benjamin, whose Andrew Aguecheek is played with an intelligence that reminds one of a Sacha Baron Cohen creation.
James Holmes makes hard work of Sir Toby Belch, insisting on playing him as a drunken sot, which is wonderful when it works, and not so wonderful when it doesn't.
This young company deserves support and, even if it raineth every day, one hopes the audiences will keep coming.
Nick Ahad
Northern Echo
SPRITE Productions may be tempting fate by staging the Shakespeare play containing a song about the rain falling every day, but wet or not - and it was a sunny, if windy, evening the night I saw the show - this is an exceptionally good production.
Everything gells beautifully in Lucy Kerbel's well-staged, wellspoken staging of a play featuring many of the Bard's favourite things - gender swapping, mistaken identity, separated twins, drunkeness and deception.
Sprite, now in its fourth year of staging plays in Ripley Castle grounds, is a young company, which means this is Shakespeare that's not stiff and stuffy, but fresh and exhuberant.
This suits Twelfth Night well, as twins survive a shipwreck to land up in Illyria where, unbeknown to each other, they get entangled with the court where Count Orsino wants more romance (he goes on about music being the food of love) and noblewoman Olivia is in mourning for her late brother.
The comedy is provided by drunkard Toby Belch, his twittish chum Andrew Aguecheek and mischievous waiting woman Maria, although their humiliation of steward Malvolio is pretty vicious, no matter how much he's asking to be taken down a peg or two.
Overseeing all this is Feste, billed as a fool, but in Jack Whitam's unsettling performance he's clearly nobody's fool. He has a devious way of turning things to his own advantage.
There isn't a weak link among the cast, so picking out people is perhaps unfair. But I liked Phoebe Whyte's boyish enthusiasm as Cesario/Viola and Joanna Croll's eager courting of him/her as Olivia, despite protestations that she's off men.
Philip Benjamin's colourfullygarbed Aguecheck, Alex Barclay's cross-gartered Malvolio and Catherine Skinner's meddlesome Maria all have memorable moments in an outstanding promenade production that moves the audience around to witness the action in various parts of the grounds.
At the outset, Viola arrives by rowing boat on the lake in the castle grounds - a neat commercial for next year's The Tempest. This will be performed around, on and in the lake, alongside a new play, The Ingilby Legends, about the house and its family.
Steve Pratt
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Photos from our 2005 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream
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