Malvolio’s jarring threat at the close of Twelfth Night, to become “revenged on the whole pack of you”, reaches fruition in Tim Crouch’s unsettling solo performance in The Crucible’s Studio.
Shakespeare’s most “notoriously abused” steward takes centre-stage in an hour-long panoramic soliloquy, spotlighting everything from the woes of a rejected lover to Malvolio’s puritanical views on modern society.
As both the play’s writer and performer, Tim Crouch delivers the charged and impressive rant of a pathetic old man, stood whimpering and huffing in a filthy undergarment with nothing but a noose for company. And the audience, of course.
When members of the audience are coerced into holding the end of Malvolio’s noose whilst we continue to sit and laugh at his prudery and pomposity, a certain guilty complicity is realised in the air. “Find that funny?” he repeats. Why, yes: it seems that the cruel audience can always find a cheap laugh in the downfall of a self-righteous clown.
Unlike the slightly grating noose scene, not all of the interactive elements completely fall short: Malvolio’s self-reflective barks on the absurdity and salaciousness of the theatre pack a certain contemporary punch, but his sarcastic remarks on the Facebook generation fail to carry much weight or humour.
Are we meant to feel sorry for him? Crouch’s Malvolio is a feeble and lonely man hopelessly and ludicrously in love with his beautiful lady. He has a ‘kick me’ sign stuck to the back of his soiled smalls. He even gets one lucky audience member to do just that – kick him. Of course we are meant to pity him.
Crouch’s script would have carried more pathos if the character delved more into his unrequited love for Olivia or his imprisonment in a darkened cellar by the play’s drunken fools, rather than peppering the stream-of-consciousness with anachronistic musings on modern life. We care, yes: but just not quite enough.
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