CULTURE-PERU: Doing the “Twelfth Night” Rumba

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Abraham Lama

LIMA, May 19 1998 (IPS) - A provocative new version of the Shakespearean comedy “Twelfth Night” is being staged in Lima, with the traditional tale of confused identity and love expressed as homosexual entanglements to the rhythm of the rumba and bolero.

Leading Peruvian stage director Alberto Isola, a graduate of the London Drama Centre, sets the action in the Caribbean and replaces Elizabethan music with boleros and congas, while adding a contemporary homosexual slant to the plot.

In the play, Viola, who survives a shipwreck, dresses as a man and pretends to be a eunuch in order to enter the service of Count Orsino, where she promptly falls in love with her employer. The Count feels attracted by her, but believing her to be a man, assumes this is a homosexual passion. Matters are conused further when his fiancee, Olivia, also falls in love with Viola.

“Twelfth night” is generally presented as an aseptic and hilarious comedy of errors, but the Isola version in the Catholic University of Lima theatre touches on the drama of the confusion of gender identities.

Isola says his version is just how Shakespeare would have wanted it done, exposing issues of Elizabethan society through stories unfolding in relatively distant, yet recognisable, scenes.

Although Shakespeare sets the action “in the city of Ilyria on the edge of the sea,” there are paragraphs in the dialogue which show the action really takes place in London, in the first act even mentioning “Mistress Mall,” a London personality of the 17th century.

Mistress Mall, who always dressed as a man and for whom “the populace of London had a fascination,” according to Shakespeare expert Luis Astrana Marin, is one of the ideological keys to the plot, said Isola.

“I consider that Shakespeare was talking of his own private life in this work. I think he tells us what it means to be homosexual in a certain society. Shakespeare plays with this, although, of course, he comes up with a conventional end to his story, for he is a classic author,” said Isola.

“The mere idea that a woman should dress as a man to survive and be forced to get another woman to fall in love, and that this woman should fall in love with her thinking she is a man, appears extraordinary to me,” he added.

The theatre director said the issue of identity has always concerned him and that he would not have approached any other Shakespeare play.

“I always asked myself why I had decided to be an actor and perhaps it was due to the facility of assuming different personalities. When you reach this conclusion you start to ask yourself why things in real life are not so flexible,” he added.

Theatre critic Alfonso La Torre stated that through the geographical updating and the boleros, Isola sketches out a very close historical horizon, helping involve the spectators in this Shakespeare play.

“The wardrobe used by the characters allow Isola to deploy a sort of malice peculiar to Lima. In the Elizabethan theatre the women were played by boys, which perhaps allowed them to explore the Socratic eros comically,” commented La Torre.

“Isola, robbed of this mechanism, doesn’t lose anything. On the Contrary, the participation of actors and actresses provides dramatic logic to the cross-dressing, and the ambiguity and voluptuous alternatives of Shakespearean humour are resolved in the dexterity of the actors’ expressions and interpretation,” he concluded.