The Royal Shakespeare Company’s main-house Christmas show is a star-studded production of Twelfth Night. While offering a few nods to the winter blues, the bittersweet comedy also boasts plenty of humour and farce - as the show’s director, Prasanna Puwanarajah, explains to What’s On...

The Royal Shakespeare Company typically eschews the work of their titular playwright at Christmas, but this year is one of the exceptions, with a new production of Twelfth Night set to be performed in the venue’s main house over the festive period. 

The title and winter setting of the poignant drama-meets-farce make it a natural choice in many ways, but director Prasanna Puwanarajah says the latest adaptation will be a seasonal rather than festive show.

“It’s a wintry production rather than a specifically Christmas one, and that’s in keeping with the play’s roots and reality as a winter play,” he says. He suggests that there’s a “baked-in calendar point” that sits naturally alongside the grief and bereavement that some of the characters are dealing with at the outset. 

“There’s something about the turn of the year that makes for a time of reflection, where you can take an audit and see how the last year has gone and what the next year might bring. There’s also something valuable to be explored in the play about coming out of the festive period. Christmas time for families is not always straightforward [especially] in terms of remembrance and what anniversaries of loss can do to people around this time of year. It’s about recovery from grief when the days are short and the nights are long, and you’re trying to navigate a dark time of the year in a place of sad remembrance.”

All of which might sound a bit doom and gloom, but like so many of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies, the play - with the subtitle What You Will - has plenty of farce and humour (the jester Feste is widely regarded as one of the Bard’s funniest characters) to balance things out.

This year’s all-new production has also been sprinkled with some festive sparkle in the shape of a few familiar TV faces. These include Samuel West (All Creatures Great And Small, Slow Horses), Freema Agyeman (Doctor Who, New Amsterdam), Gwyneth Keyworth (Alex Rider, The Trouble With Maggie Cole) and Coventry-born RSC regular Bally Gill (Slow Horses, Interview With The Vampire). 

Prasanna says he couldn’t be happier with the mix of old and new hands among the “kind, creative, bold and soulful group of artists” that has been assembled by casting director Matthew Dewsbury.

“It’s a very mixed group, and I think what’s nice about it is that everyone brings a different energy and approach. Shakespeare’s plays are like any other piece of acting - you have to work out why people do and say the things that they do and say, what’s been happening, and how that context feeds people’s actions and speech. We’re trying to be as empirical as possible, and every one of our 20 cast members has something to bring to that process.”

But as the director, how does he marshal that? Even if he knows what he wants to ultimately achieve, does he give the actors much leeway in terms of their performance and interpretation?

“As director, one of the things you’re doing is building a single storytelling lens and trying to secure its unity and internal reality - within that, anything may or may not be a valuable direction to go in. 

“Another thing you’re doing is advocating for the audience which isn’t watching it yet; working out what’s clear and what isn’t clear, and the difference between clarity and legibility - what is the thing actually saying when it’s hitting a person for the first time?”

Prasanna also talks about the need for mediation and “marshalling 20 spirits”. I suggest that his medical career - he studied medicine at New College, Oxford, and spent three years as a junior doctor - might help with the process, whether that’s in terms of having an analytical mind or simply knowing there’s a right or wrong way to go about the whole ‘procedure’.

“I think what that previous life brings to this is a fascination with people, and how they behave in the varying circumstances of a life lived. But in terms of the processes of directing, there is a kind of diagnostic, strategic toolbox in play, which is to say, what can we see, what can we observe, what can we find, what might be true, and how do those various possible truths intersect at a unifying reality? In medicine, that would be a diagnosis, and in theatre, that would be like a moment delivered in a story.

“So the processes are not dissimilar, but from a practical point of view, any mistakes could not be more divergent.”

As for his decision to swap medicine for acting (and subsequently writing and directing), Prasanna - who spent a season with the National Youth Theatre prior to his medical career - is happy to acknowledge that he simply chose to do what he ultimately enjoyed the most.

“Medicine is something that I found phenomenally challenging as a workplace, and I have huge respect for my friends and colleagues who do it. It’s just one of those things that I’m happy to acknowledge - I found that I was happier elsewhere… by some distance.

“It’s a long life. If you look back at any life and its journey, there are often places where the road doesn’t quite make sense, but I guess that’s every life lived. Lives don’t really ever make sense.”
Which arguably sums up much of Shakepeare’s work; he certainly understood the human condition, and from it fashioned all manner of dramatic narratives. 

“Absolutely, and this play in particular is about people who don’t particularly behave logically - because people don’t. They’re behaving in the context of their history, and that makes sense. But when you look at it from the outside, it doesn’t.”

As much as Prasanna likes all the “fascination and wonder and courage and chaos and beauty and wonkiness” that manifests itself in Twelfth Night - which he claims is the first Shakespeare play he fully understood - he also believes the show makes for an ultimately heartwarming and fun night out.

“It’s a production that’s hopefully going to explore the play’s life and vitality and farce, as well as its sadness. I think there’s something about that at Christmastime which makes sense - the chance to come together with friends and family to absorb one of the great artworks as a way of reflecting the year and the next year to come.”

Feature by Steve Adams

Twelfth Night shows at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, from Thursday 5 December to Saturday 18 January