Good morning everyone,

The National Theatre is putting its plays online for two weeks at a time, and I'm really happy today because it's the day for one of the best plays I've seen at the National – Twelfth Night, which is also one of the best Shakespeares I've seen. Here is a YouTube link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aig5ObghHS4

I really can't encourage you strongly enough to watch this. It's genuinely very funny and works better onscreen than I expected it to. Not like watching a home video of a school play, which is what I was a bit worried about. Maybe have it as a matinee tomorrow, that's a fun thing to do.

One of the key innovations of this version is firstly swapping Malvolio for Malvolia, but the second masterstroke is getting Tamsin Greig, who is incredible, to play her. Here's an interview with Tamsin Greig about that:

I thought in this hyperreal world, where she’s a woman, what would be shocking about her wearing yellow tights? So we needed to push it to find ultimate embarrassment. And because I have teenagers I thought what would upset them most to see me doing?

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/apr/20/tamsin-greig-malvolia-twelfth-night-national-theatre

Of course this rendering really ramps the gender fluidity of the piece, but here's a nice long article about gender fluidity in Twelfth Night as it was written, which is also pretty gender fluid:

as Valerie Traub notes, ‘it is as object of another woman’s desire that Cesario finds her own erotic voice’. When Olivia falls for Cesario, she does so in the full belief of the servant’s masculinity. As famously declared by the gender theorist Judith Butler, ‘there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender … identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results’. Cesario dresses as a man, and therefore for all intents and purposes is a man in the eyes of the other characters.

https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/a-queer-reading-of-twelfth-night

Enjoy, everyone! Hope you are well.

A xx.