Tonight, Broadway-style Twelfth Night in city

Mumbai: Combining the Bard with Broadway is an unusual feat indeed, but it’s one that you can expect on Thursday night with Filter Theatre’s unique production of Twelfth Night. It’s a fast-paced musical reworking of Shakespeare’s beloved comedy about love, gender confusion and misrule, made more accessible to today’s audiences by the international theatre artists composing Filter’s ensemble.Now in its tenth year, this production is being brought down to Mumbai for the first time, on the heels of performances in Delhi, Chandigarh, Kolkata, Bhubaneswar, Hyderabad and Goa, for two shows at 5pm and 8.30pm in the courtyard of High Street Phoenix.
This unconventional and interactive performance, directed by celebrated director Sean Holmes and re-directed by Oliver Dimsdale and Ferdy Roberts, borrows the feel of a rock gig while staying true to the original play.
“All the words are Shakespeare’s. We have edited a bit to make it just 90 minutes long and to lose some of the occasional out-of-date, 400-year-old language. But it is such a modern play, so clear, that we took the approach Shakespeare would have taken: The way in is through music; the clothes are modern; there is no set and it is performed on a bare stage,” said Simon Reade, producer of Filter Theatre.
It’s a joyful and irreverent play, said to be Shakespeare’s only pure comedy, and it was chosen for precisely that reason. “Filter Theatre is inspired by music and sound in all its work and Twelfth Night is a play which begins with all of that wrapped up into one perfect opening line: “If music be the food of love, play on!” said Reade, adding, “We are also an ensemble, so we are attracted to plays which are democratic in terms of how the roles are shared out—there are no leads. Everyone’s story is crucial to the overall plot.”
The free show is open to everyone, in the hope of engaging and inspiring all audiences, especially the youth and newcomers to Shakespeare to “make theatre, and most of all to fall in love for the very first time—or all over again,” said Reade. And they’ve even tweaked the show ever so slightly for an Indian audience, having one of the actresses deliver her lines in Hindi. “But what has struck us in India is just how Indian Shakespeare is: In a land of such extremes, such contradictions, Shakespeare seems right at home,” added Reade.