On last year's Fringe, one show got under people's skins
more than any other. The Author by Tim Crouch was an attempt to confront
audiences with their complicity in choosing to watch plays about gruesome
subjects. There was no set, just two banks of seats facing each other, the
actors sitting with everyone else. Over the course of the performance, the mood
switched from postmodern irony to something less pleasant. Many people loved
it, but more than a few found it detestable.
What those who voiced their frustration could not have
realised was Crouch's daughter, Eleanor, was one of the ushers. If someone had
a bad opinion about her dad, she heard it. "Irate audience members would
come out and lambast her father," says Crouch. "She was very
disciplined and didn't say anything."
If there are walk-outs from I, Malvolio, his offering this
year, it will not be because people are shocked by the content. They may raise
an eyebrow at seeing the normally cool and conversational actor in full
Shakespearean mode – booming voice, period garb and all – but they will not be
offended. That's why it is a surprise to find that this one-man show about the
pompous character from Twelfth Night is a companion piece to the earlier play.
"To some degree, I, Malvolio is a young person's
version of The Author in that it is about how far one is prepared to take
pleasure in somebody's cruelty to other people," he says when I meet him
at the Latitude festival where he is previewing the show.
Just as The Author asked us whether it was acceptable to
watch portrayals of violence, cruelty and sexual abuse from the comfort a seat
in the stalls, so I, Malvolio asks us why we are ready to laugh at a character
who is bullied, tricked and humiliated. Crouch takes Malvolio's side as he runs
through the ins and outs of Shakespeare's comedy, in particular the story of
the forged love letter that makes him dress up in ridiculous yellow stockings.
"The act of cruelty perpetrated by the audience on the
performer is the same act of cruelty perpetrated by Sir Toby Belch on
Malvolio," says Crouch, who takes to the stage in stained long johns and a
cockscomb hat, a figure as pathetic as he is furious.
If you are familiar with the Shakespeare play, you'll be on
a fast track to picking up on Crouch's themes, but he regards his one-man show
as a stand-alone work that should require no prior knowledge. "Malvolio
tells the story of Twelfth Night as an example of the lunacy of the world in
which he exists," he says. "It is absurd: women dressing up as men
for no reason, people marrying complete strangers . . . there is a whole raft
of nonsense and if you place a Puritan in that chaos, there's a dramatic
conflict. But I wouldn't want you to think that you have to know Twelfth Night
to get something from this play or that it's only for people who have been
pedagogically required to understand Twelfth Night."
It is not the first time Crouch has illuminated the world of
Shakespeare by focusing on a minor character. His repertoire includes I,
Caliban, I Peaseblossom and I, Banquo. Next year, he will perform I, Cinna (the
Poet) alongside an RSC production of Julius Caesar. "There has been a nice
feel to them in terms of unlocking the narrative of a play and defusing the
difficulty of the language," he says. "I've taught Shakespeare in
primary and secondary schools and if you don’t get past that, you don't unlock
anything. So I feel very liberated when I approach these plays and I also feel
duty-bound to tell the story which, in the case of I, Malvolio, is a hard one
because the story of Twelfth Night is ludicrous and labyrinthine."
Usually when you talk to playwrights, they tell you how much
their respect for Shakespeare has increased the more they have engaged with his
work. Crouch, however, is a little more circumspect. After 400 years, he
reckons we should be less hidebound by the example Shakespeare set. "I
have a huge amount of devotion and respect for him," says this son of two
English teachers. "But I also have a healthy challenge to him. There are
other ways to think about character, narrative and form. The danger is that you
deify him and his process becomes mysterious and unreachable. His process is
not unreachable; it's outstandingly extraordinary for the depth of his
perception and language, but I also know he wrote for a different time and we
are not in that time. He was a working playwright and I have a huge respect for
that."
Although created with school students in mind, I, Malvolio
has cross-over appeal. In the theatre tent at Latitude, I see it play to an
almost entirely adult audience with no sense of being out of place. On the
contrary, it gets a rapturous reception. "Last year I did two
late-night performances in Brighton, billed as adult performances," says
Crouch, who played Malvolio for real in a 2001 production of Twelfth Night by
New York's Franklin Stage Company. "Everyone assumed I would re-write it
and up the adult nature of the show. All I did was change my leopard-print
underpants to a leopard-print thong. There is no difference."
Over the past decade, his work for young people has run in
parallel to adult work such as My Arm, An Oak Tree and England. Switching
between the two has informed his keen sense of narrative and taught him what
audiences of all ages are capable of. Should he need reassurance, he looks
again to his family. "I have an 11-year-old boy who is happiest when he is
being talked to as an adult and not being patronised," he says. "In
the play, there's a big philosophical discussion around what you have allowed
to happen to Malvolio and where you get your kicks from. That's as good an
argument for an 11-year-old as it is for a grown-up."
I, Malvolio, Traverse, 17–28 August.
© Mark Fisher 2011
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