Singapore Arts Festival Blog

By Tim Crouch

Leftover Christmas turkey, anyone?

Tim Crouch’s solo deconstruction / reconstruction of Malvolio, the steward from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, was at once a visceral yet cerebral affair. Played out ostensibly like some burlesque clown-act, Crouch slyly used Malvolio’s puritanical worldview as a lens through which he examined the tragedy that so often lies at the heart of comedy.

The performance began with Malvolio already reduced, following the machinations in Twelfth Night, to a fool (and not necessarily a wise one). He then went on to alternately bait and berate the audience, chiding us as if we were wanton bullies, for the delight that we took in his degradation. In doing so, Crouch compelled us to confront our own schadenfreude: the pleasure that we derive from another’s pain.

Simultaneously, Crouch humanised Malvolio by giving voice to the ingrained insecurity, loneliness and repression that underscored the steward’s anxiety to maintain disciplined propriety and dogmatic control. As Malvolio came to realise the futility of his actions, affections and ambitions in a nihilistic universe devoid of natural order and divine justice, his existential angst and despair were heart-wrenching, but also hilarious, to witness.

Consider this, theatre-hating Malvolio then asked of the audience: in a world where the very touchstones of one’s identity – gender, status and integrity – are treated as if they were no more than props and playthings in an unending pageant of pretence, how can one ever know who anyone truly is? Can one even know oneself?

Of course, it is this very conceit of mistaken identity, one of Shakespeare’s favoured dramatic devices, which drives the action in Twelfth Night. In Malvolio’s detailing and re-detailing of the contrivances and improbabilities of the plot, he laid bare the inherent absurdity of the theatrical construct – but for which the audience, always bloodthirsty for bawdy, brutal entertainment, readily suspends its disbelief.

Thereafter, Malvolio proceeded to clean himself, remove the filthy costume that he had found himself in, and re-dress (redress?) himself in his steward’s attire. Carried out before the voyeuristic gaze of the audience, this reverse transformation, from the shit-stained butt of everyone’s joke to the corseted caretaker of order and morality, was an uneasy reclamation by Malvolio of his perceived identity.

And thus Malvolio, seemingly reborn, purported to exact his promised revenge by leaving the whole pack of us with only the stage: shorn of any spectacle, stripped of all action. As Beckett might have declared, ‘Nothing to be watched.’ Before Malvolio exited, however, he could not help but take one final, contemptuous look at the stage curtains – as if they had somehow conspired and connived to hide from him the truth of his existence.

Did this apparent reformation of Malvolio represent a genuine release from the dungeon, or merely a reprieve before his execution? On my part, I did not sense that any restoration or redemption awaited him. Rather, it seemed to me that in the unseen darkness of that backstage area, there lurked only desolation and death for a broken man, teetering on the verge of madness.

Crouch showed, through the simplicity of his stagecraft and the conscious artlessness of his performance, an acute probity and playfulness in his interrogation of human nature and dramatic artifice. By taking us to, then abandoning us in, that liminal space between pride and shame, love and hate, sanity and lunacy, order and chaos and ultimately, comedy and tragedy, Crouch revealed to us the incisive ingenuity of his theatre.

Bryan Tan