Twelfth Night

Twelfth Night
Upstairs at the Gatehouse
Highgate Village N6 4BD

Preview Feste's music here:
http://www.myspace.com/festeandthefools

Thursday 3rd - Sat 5th December at 8pm
Sun 6th December at 4pm
Box Office: 020 8340 3488
Tickets Ł10 (Ł8 concessions)

Illyria, Christmas 2009. In their lonely loft apartments, Olivia (Natalie Rowland) and Orsino (Stiofan Lanigan O’Keefe) stave off the ennui of their rich but empty existences with hours of introspection and the company of their iPods. Olivia’s cousin Sir Toby Belch (Mark Overall) and his scrofulous carousing companions (Toby Moore and Tim Solomons) choose drinking, computer games and Malvolio (Edward Smith)-baiting as their entertainment. They are abetted by Olivia’s mischievous companion Maria (Ali Newell) while the artist formerly known as Feste (Christian Radnedge) provides a musical backdrop to both households.

This peaceful existence is disrupted by the arrival of Viola (Laura Allen) and Sebastian (new member Raheem Ali), teenage twins who retain all the enthusiasm of spaniel puppies despite being nearly drowned and then separated from each other after their ship was wrecked on Illyria’s rocky coast. Their rescuers are both played by our second new member in the cast, Ashley Gayle.

This production of Twelfth Night will be perfect frothy entertainment for a pre-Christmas treat with songs (new tunes by Christian Radnedge), slapstick, romantic problems, ridiculous cases of mistaken identity and enough serious and poignant moments to save it from being entirely frivolous. And of course some beautiful poetry.

Director's blog

Mary Musker

1 November

After a brilliant and successful run of Our Country's Good, at two different venues, Twelfth Night now occupies the much coveted "current show" spot. This also means the performance week is approaching fast - four weeks tomorrow we will be building the set and moving into the theatre.
The cast are working hard, mostly off the book with lines learned, and Christian and his band Feste and the Fools are in the studio. We've got the costume team coming to rehearsal tonight and we have won an auction for a "box tree" on eBay.

4 October

Feste and the Fools - coming soon to a stadium near you! Check back for some preview downloads soon.

3 October 2009

Started rehearsals this week, and it's going really well. Actors who've never met each other before are working together like old friends, lots of inventive ideas coming out and we're all working hard and having a good time. Plus Jon has nearly finished the poster and Christian has written the main tunes which sound great.

9 September 2009

Production starts in earnest now! The show is fully cast and this week is a flurry of emails arranging photo shoots, negotiating rehearsal slots and planning the set, costumes and other tech stuff. Official blurb is now posted above.

2 August

Audition notice is on the auditions page of the website now. Plus audition pieces, which can be downloaded there or by clicking HERE.

24 July

Had our first Production meeting tonight. Very successful.

24 July

Download my cut script HERE

23 March

Reading Peter Hall's book Shakespeare's Advice to the Players. Very, very interesting indeed. Right now am cutting the script to get it in under the magical two-hour mark. And listening to Canadian alt-country music while I do it, strangely appropriate.

23 Feb

More good news; Peter Batchelor, who took the fab photos for The Tempest (amongst other GST shows) has agreed to take both the show photos and, possibly more importantly, the photos I'm going to need for the set... but I don't want to give away more about that yet. Here's a couple of my favourites:

I've also enlisted Sarah Overall and Miranda Solomons to style and source the costumes, with help from Jo Moore who is also going to act as Executive Producer (ooohh!) and keep all of us, and the budget, under control. And Jon Musker (yes relation) is again going to design a poster for me.
The Railway Children opens at the end of this week so I should get on with practicing my F# scale...

3 Feb 2009:

Right now we're in the middle of rehearsing for The Railway Children, but thinking about ideas for Twelfth Night remain any important priority. I went to a workshop at the Globe last week which gave me some interesting ideas about focus and different ways of acting in a space (like the Gatehouse) where you have audience on three sides.
We had a GST lighting workshop last weekend which was also useful as a starting point for thinking about what to do with the Twelfth Night lighting. My original ideas was to have a single, white, set, which is lit in different ways to show whether we are in Orsino or Olivia's house, but maybe we can do something more interesting that that...
I've started cutting the script and annotating it with set/props/lighting notes etc. And am using GST events to drum up interest in coming to the audition. Our Countrys Good is the previous show and Angela, the director, is going to need 12 people for that, then I need 12 for Twelfth Night so schmoozing the actors is important at this stage!

9 December 2008:

David Lane, who was Stage Manager for Breaking the Code, reminded me at the weekend that he has offered/agreed to run Lighting for Twelfth Night, and I missed him off my list, above. Sorry David, and thanks!

3 December 2008:

My production of Twelfth Night is now exactly a year away. This week I'm operating the sound for our production of Breaking the Code, and it's great to be in the theatre Upstairs at the Gatehouse and be thinking that this time next year I'll be back with Twelfth Night.

I've known I'm going to be directing it for about nine months already, and have lots of plans in my head. I already have a production assistant - Debbie Lane, a stage manager - Chris Pleass, and a set designer - Andy Farrer. Andy is in Breaking the Code, as is Christian Radnedge who, has agreed to write some original tunes for me for the songs in the show.

The dressing room at the Gatehouse is really small, and we'll have a big musical production in rehearsal at the same time as Twelfth Night, so I'm cutting it down to 12 characters. And, to less than 2 hours running time.