Hello, I'm Simon Godwin, the director of Twelfth Night,
and it's great to be with you and I'm thrilled to be joined by Tamsin Greig who
played Malvolia in the production.
Hello. And I'm thrilled to be here also from my front room and,
thrilled to be talking to Simon Godwin,
who is in a different continent. But it feels like we're in the same room,
and that's very nice.
Thanks Tamsin. That's right.
I'm actually in Washington DC where I'm running a Shakespeare theatre.
And so Shakespeare is very much the theme,
especially on today of all days as of course it's Shakespeare's birthday.
Well Tamsin,
what a great opportunity to remember this show together and to talk about it.
I'd like to ask you, what are your big memories of doing it?
I remember it as being an incredibly,
happy time.
I love being in that company of performers and,
I loved the amount of time that you get at National Theatre to,
investigate and collaborate and find out what on earth you're supposed to be
doing. And particularly as when I was first asked to do it,
I was quite resistant and felt nervous about taking it on.
What are your memories?
Well yes,
my memories are that it was enormously good fun.
There's something incredibly tender and life-affirming about that script,
about this play.
And I remember a company gathering that were very much shared in their energies
and their kind of optimism actually,
and this play that is about grief and loss,
but actually on the other side of grief and loss being love and humanity was
very strongly experienced, I felt in the room by all of us. But,
it's good to remember that it was a really thoughtful and complex project to
work on,
and I remember Tamsin our early conversations related to the whole question,
which I'm sure folks will be thinking about, of this is the first time that,
certainly in Britain, the part of Malvolio has been played by a woman.
And I remember our discussions about how could we do that?
What would be the gain of doing that? What would be the terror of doing that?
And I remember those readings that we did together. We did the play out loud.
You and I trying to go; Yes? No? Is it a good idea? Is it not? I mean,
I have great affection for those moments,
but the stakes felt quite high at the time, didn't they?
Yeah. Well, I remember sitting in the room with you, reading it out.
And I remember you saying, well, let's read the play. And I was like, how's
that even going to work?
And just sort of sitting in a room reading it and going backwards and forwards,
you know, not each of us playing particular characters,
but just saying the words,
and realising it's quite long.
And also that it's
quite complicated.
Big ensemble piece with lots of interweaving stories,
but I think I remember early on when I was thinking about Malvolio,
just how much he talks himself as a man.
He talks himself as a he. And he's very,
very clear on his pronoun.
And so I felt very nervous about how I would ever approach that because I didn't
see what value there would be in me playing Malvolio,
as a man.
There was that moment,
I remember when we did change the pronouns and he became she, and Malvolio
became Malvolia. And
going back and reading it then as a consciously female character,
which allowed you to be the gender that you are in life, felt very liberating.
And suddenly the story came alive in new ways and it seemed natural and
believable. And I felt that was the moment when I could say to you,
hand on heart, this is going to work and let's do it.
And you rightly took your time and thought about that carefully,
and maybe we even did another reading.
And then you wonderfully said yes and off we went.
I remember coming to you early on when we were just thinking about it,
and I thought about the feeling of someone realising for the first time that
they are loved. And that kind of giddiness.
And makes that feeling of not being able to quite,
feel your feet on the ground. So I remember saying to you,
so when Malvolia finds out that she might be loved,
can she fly?
Yes. Can she, you know, just hover. You know that sort of,
it's like I'm walking on air,
just that hovering feeling and then you went away and were quite quiet for a
couple of weeks and, so I tentatively, went back and said, oh,
do you know that idea, maybe you'd forgotten about it?
And I remember you came back and said oh yes, yes, no,
I did go back to the National, we did talk about that,
but they've just done Peter Pan, so no. Yeah,
they spent all their money already on the flying machinery,
it should go back to the workshop.
But then as a sort of little postscript. You then said, so no you can't fly,
but I can give you a fountain.
Great. So, I mean, terrific.
I do remember actually in rehearsal time seeing on the call one day,
Miss Greig,
fountain workshop,
and feeling a mixture of horror and idiocy at the thought that I was going to
have to sit down with you and the design team and stage management and talk
about it, a fountain as a concept.
And yet, we did, and then we sat down, and I remember thinking,
well okay, so the fountain's a character.
That is a character in the scene,
so the fountain has to go on a journey. So what's wrong with the fountain?
Yes, brilliant. Where we start with all characters. You know, what's wrong,
what's wrong, what's the problem here?
And then you go on the journey. And that's what Shakespeare,
I think does with these characters. Okay. So what's wrong here?
What's the problem? I think you're absolutely right, Tamsin. The props,
are a character, and you have a very natural sense of build,
which I think is so intrinsic to comedy as well, that something has to grow,
it has to get more extreme.
And it has to get more problematic in order for the comedy to also rise.
Hence the journey with the fountain that folks will be seeing.
Getting wet every night. Yes.
I think I was very nervous about suggesting that to you.
But another reason why you're so extraordinary as an actress is that you do give
yourself entirely to the process, and to the character.
And I knew as I was talking to you that there was one part of you going;
I don't want to do this. This will be awful. I will get wet every night. No.
Another part that could see the glorious potential in this offer,
and was weighing those two things up and you brilliantly,
heroically accepted the challenge.
Which is another good way of talking about the other big challenge,
which of course was the, reveal of the yellow stockings,
which you showed comparable heroic courage in engaging with.
Well, I just remember thinking at the time, you know for a puritan,
in Elizabethan theatre to come on in yellow stockings, and cross gartered,
it would have been monstrous and you know in the most wonderful way of
diminishing a pompous bully. But then I thought,
well if it's a woman and you know,
you put her in jazzy yellow stockings and she'll probably look quite good.
So you know, that's not enough. That's the beginning.
And so then we started to think about,
well if we're starting with the tights, cause they're just tights,
they're yellow tights, where else can they go?
How do you hide something in order for it to be revealed at the right time,
but also as you say, for it to build. And because I have teenagers at home,
well, I did at the time.
I just imagined the worst possible things for them to see me doing.
And that wasn't hard to come up with then,
the things that would make them cringe.
But again, what you pulled off Tamsin,
was a sense of going back to the ecstatic of going,
this is a character who feels released,
who feels seen and who feels loved and feels liberated.
And it was a very important thing for us that we got absolutely into the mindset
of that character that we didn't endgame it.
It wasn't a character that secretly feared this was going to go wrong.
This was a character that was absolutely certain that it was going to go right.
And somebody who have given the green light to her carnal exuberance after a
lifetime of hiding it.
And I think that's what justified it being such a theatrical moment of reveal in
every sense.
I know that some people felt that it was uncharacteristic.
That such a hard,
tough woman would suddenly behave in that way.
But I'd actually experienced it. I'd seen,
in fact my own Mum, behave in that way when she'd got some news.
And suddenly became a sort of child,
giddy with the knowledge that somebody loved her. And,
so I sort of just built it around that. You know, the wildness,
the ecstasy, when they begin to smell
the possibility that they're loved.
I think that's beautiful Tamsin, and it makes me think about Metamorphoses.
And this was a text by Ovid, a classical text that Shakespeare we know loved,
and based so many of his stories around.
And Metamorphoses is essentially a set of stories about people changing their
shape physically.
And I think his characters didn't always change their shape physically,
but they do change their shape psychologically and emotionally,
and they become butterflies in their own imaginations.
And I feel very strongly that's what you found in Malvolia.
But I think what was really brilliant and very,
very interesting was the fact that you're very interested in reenvisioning
Shakespeare, and allowing women to play classically male roles.
And what that then does,
to the play when Malvolia is a woman but Feste is also woman and Fabian becomes
Fabia.
And what happens then to the way that Malvolia is demolished and especially at
the hands of women. And I thought that that was very interesting.
And then it comes away slightly from the outing of a lesbian,
and then destroying her.
It then becomes actually about what women do to one another,
to undermine each other when there is potentially more judgement within that
gender of one another, but also of judgment in women.
And I think that was a very interesting thing that you uncovered.
There's no exclusivity to cruelty. I mean everybody has access to it.
And I was so keen to avoid any stereotypes, be it for better or for worse.
We are in the end humanity.
And I think the extraordinary thing I discovered about the gender was that it
was so powerful. And yet as the play continued,
you sort of forgot who quite was a man or a woman or playing a man or a woman.
And Shakespeare takes over and his universal themes of the human heart conquer
everything.
And that was extraordinary to see and to experience and realise.
And of course let's not forget that, it's all very silly. You know,
the idea of Twelfth Night where things are turned upside down. You know,
it was traditionally when the King becomes a pauper and vice versa,
and that there is room for extreme silliness and hilarity. And,
I do remember having a lot of fun and laughing a lot in the rehearsal room with
you. And we're sounding quite serious and quite academic,
but actually it was really about what is,
what is the best silliness that we can get out of this.
And I remember saying to Michael Bruce the composer, I said,
so then the stairs are going to come round and then Malvolia is going to come
down, and then there's going to be a number,
Malvolia goes off when she comes down the stairs.
He goes away and sets a Shakespeare sonnet to music overnight.
He comes back and says, so I've written you a song, and I was like, what?
He said, well, you said Malvolia's number. I said, yeah, a bit of music.
He goes no, no, no, no, that means a song. I went oh no, I,
no, no, no, I didn't...I just meant some music. He went,
it's a song you're going to sing.
Cut to...the cabaret number.
I believe we genuinely made Twelfth Night funny. I mean, it's a funny play,
but it's not always funny in performance.
And I think we captured that Bacchic style of enormous...well as my three year
old twins tell me,
I'm a cheeky daddy and I think one always wants to be a cheeky daddy when it
comes to Shakespeare. Shakespeare's plays were done of course in the open air.
They were done in a huge open air auditorium where everyone could see everyone
else. Everyone could, as it were, join in, they could shout out,
throw cabbages or whatever. And again,
it's so important in a modern theatre setting to create that feeling of
engagement and involvement.
And I think it was the skill of all the company to be able to receive ideas and
reactions from the audience and actively play with that.
And I hope that's something that even the broadcast contains or reflects.
I hope so.
There was one night actually where I could see backstage on the monitor,
there was a young person leaning like that on the stage.
They were sitting in the front row like that, and all of us backstage,
were going, someone is touching the stage, they're leaning on the stage,
which you know is sort of sacrosanct. You can't touch the stage.
And so I thought. What can we do? What can we do? What can we do?
And then the next scene was when Malvolia comes on and discovers this big party
and they've all been carousing and she's horrified at what they do.
And I went around the front stage and walked past this person like that and
turned round and pointed directly at him and on the line said,
"Is there no respect". And just
told him to get his hands off,
and the audience really engaged with that kind of liveness of the audience being
participants in it.
But then I did feel bad and later in the letter scene I did engage with him and,
you know,
get him on board cause I felt I didn't want him to think I was being rude.
Wow. Your kindness triumphs Tamsin, but I think,
I think the audience is very much there to be included and played with and that
was a great example. It summed up the whole spirit of the show I think.