by AMY BARRATT

Twelfth Night is one of Shakespeare’s most-produced plays, and it seems like every director has his own pet idea about where it should be set. For Yves Desgagnés, who directs the current production of La Nuit des rois (translation by Normand Chaurette) at Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, the inspiration came from the work of artist Richard Morin.

The visual impression, as the curtain rises on Morin’s towering set, is stunning. We sense that a world has been created, and it’s a world in which, as in Shakespeare, marvellous things can happen.

Desgagnés’s prime innovation is to present the character of the Duke, Orsino, as a painter. All of the play’s action is framed by the high, plain walls of his studio, as if the actors are figures in a painting, figments of the artist’s imagination. The artist’s renderings of the face of his beloved, the Countess Olivia (Isabelle Blais) are everywhere.

The whole production, really, is a paean to the beauty of Olivia, who, as played by Blais, displays none of the blandness this character sometimes falls into. We get the sense that even her supposed mourning for her brother is just a pretence to keep away people who bore her. This is a lady who knows what she wants, beneath whose initial silvery garb lurks a red-hot interior. Blais has come a long way in the few years since she played Juliet on these boards.

There is no consistency of time and place indicated by Judy Jonker’s costumes. A few suggest the Elizabethan period, others are closer to modern day, with some - like Sir Andrew’s (Pierre Curzi) spiderweb pyjamas - too fanciful to place. Many of the characters first appear as blank slates, or only partially coloured-in. Viola (Catherine Trudeau), when she first decides to dress as a boy, is given an Elizabethan doublet and hose all in white. From scene to scene this costume takes on more and more rich orange and gold.

It is all, as I say, quite stunning. And yet… perhaps because painting is a static art form, whereas theatre, like a shark, must keep moving or die, the more we are convinced we are inside a painting, the less tension we feel.

Frankly there’s something a little creepy about the middle-aged Orsino (Gilbert Sicotte) mooning around his studio, painting likenesses of the nubile Olivia. Desgagnés has made Orsino’s supposedly undying love the whole focus of the play, and that makes it problematic to accept his sudden desire for Viola at the end. Even Sicotte doesn’t seem sure how to play this.

TNM was obviously looking for a light, entertaining diversion for the holiday season, and they’ve certainly got that in La Nuit des rois. Desgagnés, with Morin’s collaboration, has made a thing of beauty, but has failed to cast much light on Shakespeare’s text.

Job posting

Job: The Hip-Hop Musical, as winner of Best Text at last summer’s Fringe, finally gets its reading at Chapters. The rap lyrics recreating the story of Job in the offices of a hip hop recording company, will be read sans music by creators Eli Batalion and Jerome Saibil. Watch this space for more Job news coming soon. Reading: Sunday, Jan. 5, 6 p.m. at Chapters (1171 Ste-Catherine W.). :

La Nuit des rois, to Dec. 21, then Jan. 7–23 at TNM
(84 Ste-Catherine W.), 866-8668 to reserve

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