Twelfth Night, Tricycle

Within a few minutes of this Filter production of Shakespeare's comedy of mistaken identity I knew I was in the middle of something outrageous. We'd entered to theatre to find a double bass centre stage, musical instruments, laptops, a drum kit, a trumpet, a few mini Marshall amps cluttering up the rest – “where are all the actors going to go?” asks one of the audience. The actors meander onto the stage, talking amongst themselves; “Chat a bit longer,” one tells the audience as we quiet in expectation, “we're not ready yet.” After a while they break into a jazz overture, and so begins one of the wildest, most frenetic, upturned, shaken all about versions of a first folio text – the Bard via Charles Mingus.

The fourth wall has rarely found itself so neglected – the audience provide costume, some get slugs of tequila, some are dragged up on stage to dance (yes that was me cavorting like I thought I knew how), at one point pizzas are delivered and passed to those in the upper tier. Meanwhile on stage a cacophony of imagination and rulebreaking guides every twist and turn of the plot. The shipping forecast tells Violio she is in Illyria; a mobile phone rings and Orsino takes the call; two characters crack tins of Special Brew; while most are in modern dress, Sir Toby meanders about drunkenly in full Elizabethan ruff-ness before later collapsing in one of the aisles; Malvolio strips to his boxers at the joy of his mistaken love; all the while crazy shit house rat jazz music is played, supplemented with scene-setting soundscapes eeked out of sample-firing playstation joysticks, feedbacking microphones, cymbals played with cello bows, all created on stage in front of your eyes, gorged on a unrestrained, febrile exuberance and then, just occasionally, a Shakespeare play breaks out.

Ah, the play. Well it happened, or some of it happened, there were mistaken identities, and upturned love affairs and hearts broken and Malvolio, O Malvolio, how he does fall viciously prey to consumption of a broken mistaken heart identity. Who knows how much of the play there is in this Twelfth Night, and in what order. Not me anyway, having spurned the chance beforehand to read the wikipedia synopsis, I barely followed the plot, but it mattered not, because the riotous energy of the show - one that takes up the challenge of making theatre work every inch of its limitations - carries you past the humble considerations of what precisely is going on. It is enough to understand enough to enjoy enough; if it ends abruptly after 90 minutes with someone having happened to somebody, who cares, I went home singing the finale. Here is a musical which never seemed to force its music on its subject (nor, admittedly, its subject onto its music); but which made music its subject, its food of love, and constructed out of that music a bizarre, crazy carnival, worth every crazy, bizarre minute.

King Lear, Barbican

Recently, having spent much of my youth cultivating acute cultural ignorance, I decided that perhaps Shakespeare and all that kind of thing might actually be interesting after all. Although previous experiences have been a mixed bag, I don’t think you can really go wrong with a good tragedy. And of all Shakespeare’s major tragedies the only one of which I was completely ignorant – of plot, characters and type and magnitude of tragedy to unfold – was King Lear. So for sometime I had been waiting for a fairly traditional, unaffected production with which to gloriously lose my Lear innocence, free from the attentions of English teachers and the like. This production was poorly advertised and I felt very lucky to secure a seat near the front of the stalls at very late notice. So imagine my delight when, taking my seat in the plush and sparsely attended auditorium, I opened the programme to see that the play would be in Russian, with English subtitles.

Now the more savvy of you may be able to tell, at a glance, that a production by the Maly Drama Theatre of St Petersburg will certainly be in Russian, but I did not. I even read an entire article on the director, Lev Dodin, in a newspaper, without realising. But even though it did occur to me as I was waiting in the bar for the play to start, I made the tragically naïve assumption that if a theatre was to host a play in Russian, or indeed in any foreign language, especially a classic of English drama, they might put themselves out enough to actually explain this clearly on such publicity as they bothered to produce.

Paralysed by the imminent start of the play my girlfriend and I were unable to decide to make a quick dash for a refund and after I’d digested my disappointment at sullying my Lear tabla rasa, we decided to try it out and see just how great Shakespeare is in Russian, in a play that was apparently in rehearsal for three years. The first problem was that the subtitles were on a screen high over the stage and our fantastic stalls seats meant that it was either actors or subtitles. No amount of neck straining could bring the two into one viewpoint. On the other hand, of all the plays to watch in a foreign language, Shakespeare’s probably loses the least in comprehensibility, what with being generally unfathomable at the best of times. Even as the script flashed past me in large green letters, with Russian actors enunciating beautifully beneath, I was still hard-pressed to know exactly what was going on.

As for the production, the Russian flavour was evident even to me. The three daughters were in bright, white robes, set against a black stage, with only grey to liven it up. The Fool, dressed as a sort of Marcel Marceau type, spent much of the first act lounging at a bar-room piano, on which he and Lear played Russian ditties. I particularly enjoyed the piano-playing, partly as it gave me respite from trying to read the subtitles. And the Fool was great to watch in any language.

Towards the end of the first act one of the secondary characters, possibly an Edmund or Edgar or someone like that, unexpectedly ripped off all his clothes and skulked in the shadows of the stage, cock swinging like a bell-rope. My girlfriend perked up at this point. “I’m glad we stayed now,” she confided to me. "Oh, its nothing to do with that!" she said as she realised her profligate transparency. In fact this was just a softener, as early in the second act three more of the actors divested themselves of costume and cavorted about in the altogether. Trivia buffs should note that this may well be the only Shakespeare production in history to have stolen an old Young Ones joke – one with a naked Neil and a fortuitously placed flower pot.

In the interval we decided to swap seats for some further back, in the hope that we could watch the play and read the subtitles in one go. Of course life being what it is, we chose seats that still didn’t allow us to combine both, but yet were far enough away to make reading the subtitles a strain. This did not help me follow the action at all. By now I’d had a good read of the programme, which explained that the Russian translator had cut out lots of the more political parts of the play, along with most of the soliloquies, and was playing up the kitchen-sink drama, all fathers and daughters. Even I could tell that this left some very peculiar gaps in the plot, not least the fact that there was no battle with which to bring about Lear’s final tragedy. I was still hoping for a bit more of the Fool, before Lear callously dropped the news that he’d been hanged, without so much as a by-or-leave. As for the finale, it just sort of happened, without there being any real explanation for how or why. I assumed that I must have fallen asleep, but apparently not.