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Culture Theatre

Fringe review: I, Malvolio

I, MALVOLIO by Tim Crouch (impel Theatre/Fringe). At Artscape YoungPlace (180 Shaw). July 8-13 at 7:30 pm. See listing. Rating: NNNN


Audience engagement, of both the active and silent varieties, is key to British writer Tim Crouch’s powerful solo re-imagining of the unloved and unstable major domo character in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.

At this show (directed with care by Kendra Jones) you may be called upon to assist in a public hanging, kick the actor in the butt, or called out for wearing glasses or laughing too much. It’s all a bit intense for those of us who squirm at the idea of being shut in a small room with a loud and large personality. Thankfully, performer Justin Otto is a clever mind reader and he chooses his victims well.

But quieter mental work is also required. Crouch wrote (and performed) this play to be relentlessly confronting, forcing the audience to see things from Malvolio’s previously unexplored lonely and angry perspective. In the same obsessive, vein Otto never lets up, threatening to exact revenge on everyone in the room, reading Olivia’s famous, though false, declaration of love letter again and again, minutely analyzing the fantastically unlikely relationships between the Twelfth Night characters.

It’s a time-traveling onslaught that only ends when the play does. Malvolio is gone. The audience remains perched on child-sized chairs in a suddenly silent former public school classroom, pencils and teacher evaluation sheets in hand, mulling over questions of cruelty and spectacle and what purpose theatre serves. 

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