"Twelfth Night"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 723, 22 May 1953, Page 17

"Twelfth Night"

by

NZBS

AID to have been performed at Court for England’s. first Queen Elizabeth, Shakespeare’s Twelfth’ Night will have its next performance in New Zealand on the eve of a new Elizabethan reign. An NZBS production of the play will be broadcast from 3YC on. Tuesday, May ' 26, at 8.0 p.m., from 1YC on Wednesday, May 27, at 7.30 p.m, and later from other National stations.) .7» Though not notable for the probability of its plot, Twelfth Night has even been considered one of the most delightful of Shakespeare’s comedies. True, the play has not always impressed its audiences. Pepys, for instance, recorded in his diary: "After dinner to the Duke’s house, and there saw Twelfth Night acted well, though it be but a silly play, and not related at all to the name or day." But Hazlitt says: "It is full of sweetness and- pleasantry. . . It has little satire and no spleen. . . It makes me laugh at the follies of not despise them, and still less bear any. illwill towards them. Shakespeare’s comic genius resembles the bee rather in its power of extracting sweets from. weeds and poisons, than in.leaving the sting behind it." There are few cuts in the NZBS version of Twelfth Night, which was adapted for radio by John CarsonParker. The broadcast will take slightly less than two hours. The part. of Orsino is taken by William Austin, Sebastian by Gavin Yates, Viola by Virginia Stott, Olivia by Shirley Walker, Maria by Ria Sohier, Malvolio by Peter Varley, Sir Toby Belch by Selwyn Toogood, and Feste, the clown, by Harry Painter. Twelfth Night is full of echoes from others of ‘Shakespeare’s plays..Sir Toby,

a for instance, is no very distant kin of Falstaff, and the twin-mistaken-identity theme is similar to that in The Comedy of Errors, but the. comedy does not suffer on that account.