This year’s CanStage Dream in High Park presentation is Twelfth Night adapted and directed by Gregory Prest. He takes a pretty straightforward approach. He has added a sort of prologue in which Feste speaks of the relationship between Love and Madness (and makes a few jokes about the audience and their picnics). The Love and Madness thing seems to be the central concept as far as there is one. The first two scenes are reversed too. We first meet Viola on the beach before Orsino gets to make his famous “If music be the food of love” speech. And, of course, there are cuts to fit it into the Dream time slot of 90-100 minutes. None of this really makes a whole lot of difference. The show comes across as a well acted, crisply directed, perfectly intelligible comedy and hurrah for that!

In this production, unlike some other editions of DiHP that I have seen, all the actors seem comfortable with speaking Shakespearian text and there’s some pretty good comic acing too. Caroline Toal is a very winning Viola/Cesario and works well with both Ghazal Azarbad’s rather bubbly Olivia and Farhang Ghajar’s straightforwardly effective Orsino. Ori Black is a very athletic Sebastian though the fact that he’s considerably taller than Toal may cause some confusion in the “mistaken ID” scenes for those not familiar with the play. These scenes in fact are really well done and extremely affecting.

There is, as they say, good fooling from the trio of Maria (Navtej Sandhu), Sir Toby (Mike Shara) and Sir Andrew (Justin Otto). There’s a fine line here between making the characters ridiculous enough and just too ridiculous for words. All three actors manage that line well. Their timing is excellent especially in the farce like scenes where they are guying Malvolio (Rick Roberts). There are also a number of places where Sir Andrew covers his head with some sort of metal can. I have no idea whether this has any relation to the Clacton by-election. Roberts’ Malvolio is rather good; steering a skilful line between pompous and pitiable. Steven Sutcliffe’s Feste; costumed as a traditional jester complete with cap with bells, is slyly funny and he sings pretty well too. In general the musical side of things (composition and sound design by Olivia Wheeler) is handled very well. The minor roles are all played perfectly well too.

All in all, this Twelfth Night has pretty much what I want when I go to High Park; a play that can sensibly be condensed into the time available, good acting including proper treatment of the text and brisk effective directing. It’s a good night out.

Photo credit: Dahlia Katz