Adapting such an important text as The Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare was a brave choice. Why? Because it has been performed so many times throughout the centuries, that it seems almost impossible to bring a new perspective. But it seems that director Botond Nagy and the team from the National Theater of Cluj have managed to produce an impressive show in all of its elements and especially the manner in which a comedy published in 1602 has been made contemporary [...] The characters, the lighting, the music, the movement, everything contributes to the sensuality which characterizes Botond Nagy's shows. This production is a must-see for any theater lover and not only. [...].

Bianca Tămaș, A douăsprezecea noapte sau cum doriți [The Twelfth Night or As You Will],
Clujul Cultural, March 18^th, 2024

An explosion of color, improbable connections, shocking revelations, and seduction. Everything is charming. Skin-based, cloth-based, wool-based (the twins Sebastian and Viola (Diana Buluga) seem to be born out of their own yellow hats. The same is true about the sound and the music. The original score was composed by Claudiu Ursu (the synchronization between Ursu's sounds and Niculescu's video-wave pulsations is flawless!), the most famous score is performed by Anca Hanu (divine!) and the rest of the cast (In the Heat of the Twelfth Night was my original favorite, but I was amazed by the ending!). But the gestures, acrobatics, and dance are also charming (the choreographer Andrea Gavriliu should get an OSIM certificate) and completely define certain characters, such as Olivia's shadow (Diana-Ioana Licu), invented by Botond.

Mihai Brezeanu, LiterNet,
April 2024

William Shakespeare, one of the most prominent Western writers of all times, was born in 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon and died in 1616, at the age of 52 years old, in his native district. Although his entire personal and professional life has been, throughout the centuries, the object of constant speculation, the historical documents place him at the center of the theatrical life of London at the end of the 16^th century and the beginning of the 17^th century - as an actor and especially as a dramatist. The peak of his career is linked to the Globe Theater, founded by his company, The Lord Chamberlain's People (renamed The King's People under the patronage of Jacob I). Ironically, one of the first records of his activity is a diatribe by the pamphlet writer Robert Greene, written before the latter's death, who compares the actor-dramatist with other authors of his time, criticizing his lack of intellectual and stylistic refinement and mocking his literary ambitions.

However, Shakespeare's work still constitutes the most important landmark of European culture. His enormous influence on the English language is universally accepted and celebrated today. Amongst his best-known plays there are tragedies such as Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, or King Lear, comedies such as The Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado About Nothing, The Twelfth Night, or A Midsummer Night's Dream, as well as deeply melancholic works, full of often dark lyricism, which transgress all classical genre taxonomies, such as Troilus and Cressida, Cymbeline, or The Tempest.

The Twelfth Night or How You Will is one of Shakespeare's best-known comedies. It was written at the beginning of the 17^th century and published in 1623, in a folio of Shakespeare's works. As the first part of the title suggests, the text is - most likely - the result of commission work for the celebration of the Epiphany, the day which puts an end to the winter holidays, associated in many cultures with the upending of the normal order of things and even with a playful exchange of identities.
 

The main story is the separation of the twins, which triggers a series of confusions and predictable comical situations. However, the play is thematically layered, having a nostalgic and ambiguous tone which allows multiple interpretations. Thus, the love story can be read through the more serious lens of sexual and identitary anxieties.

Viola arrives in Illyria, as a result of being shipwrecked, and is convinced that her twin brother Sebastian has drowned. Believing herself to be all alone, she dresses up as a man and is employed by the duke Orsino. The latter is courting Olivia, who is in mourning after her father and brother and who despises the duke's efforts. Viola, disguised as Cezarino, falls in love with her master and, unwillingly, becomes the object of Olivia's love. Sebastian's return ultimately restores balance and allows the formation of two happy couples.

A conversation with Botond Nagy, the director of the show The Twelfth Night or What You Will

Botond Nagy was born in 1993 and graduated from the University of Arts in Târgu-Mureș, under the mentorship of László Bocsárdi. Ever since his first years working in the field, he has become visible through his distinct creative force and proved himself to be an influential artistic presence, both in the Romanian theatrical world and the Hungarian or even European one. His shows have been produced at important state and independent theaters, building complex universes, where sound and image are combined in ample poetic structures. This is his first collaboration with the National Theater of Cluj.

Emma Pedestru: Generally speaking, your shows that were based on classical texts have explored the fundamental elements and ideas of that literary work, finding their contemporary equivalents and their ahistorical valences. What are these in The Twelfth Night?

Botond Nagy: I think the first is love, love as pretext... A pretext for communicating, in fact, something else. In Shakespeare's work, except for Romeo and Juliet, no play is actually about love per se, rather, love is used to meditate on other topics. In Romeo and Juliet, love has very high stakes, it is a life-or-death situation, which ultimately leads to freedom. In The Twelfth Night, I think love is an element through which Shakespeare tells us that it doesn't matter whom we love; it is important that we can still love. For me, this is a simple reminder that life can get so absurd and uncontrollable, that it makes no sense to try to figure it out; instead, we should experience it in its purest, maximal form.

E.P.: So, what did you count on when adapting Shakespeare's play?

B.N.: It is as transparent as possible: I wanted to understand, first of all, what the play is about, without any high-brow complications. To catch its feeling. Working with Shakespeare, you have to ask yourself: "what's the theme?" Is it the melancholy of death and oblivion? Is it the beauty of life with a touch of sadness? I see Shakespeare as a friendlier figure - a guy from my neighborhood, with whom I can play hide-and-seek, with whom I can make sand garages instead of sandcastles. That's who he is to me. And I think it is very bourgeois and fake to try to grant him a galactic importance, which we don't even know how to grasp or discuss. Shakespeare makes us feel that we are close to the mystery of life, that's what all great artists do, but I don't think we should force ourselves to understand it; rather, we should embrace it. He is a cool, important author, whose language was simply alive... And I think this is why his themes are still relevant - because he had such a direct manner, which troubled his contemporaries. He didn't work with philosophical subtleties that nobody could understand, but his wisdom was magnificent. Shakespeare himself was just playing. Even with his own identity. Let us not forget that he was, in fact, a Catholic bisexual in Protestant times. And I think The Twelfth Night is also a game of hidden identities, of combined genders, of overlapping protagonists, which only serves to broaden the concept of love. This is what Shakespeare did: he hid many things in his own life, and then he allowed himself the freedom to play with those things. Through Shakespeare, we should also gain the freedom of being playful, of understanding and being who we are.

E.P.: How does this paradigm of playing with identities accommodate your decision to change certain characters' gender - the most prominent being, of course, Malvolia?

B.N.: I opted for an inversion - an "extra-gender" inversion, let us call it - because we live in a totally different world now. And this transformation has happened naturally. Thus, not only is Malvolia an openly gay woman, but so are her peers: Fabiana, Maria - who is portrayed as a transvestite... In a way, it seems very tough to me, looking at Malvolia's tragedy, that women can be cruel to other women. So, we are not trying to make a statement through our choices; we want to show the diverse situations that can occur in our world: regarding gender and affect. Gender is abolished, giving way to a universal sort of love. In fact, in The Twelfth Night, we are talking about certain sudden changes which make everyone fall in love with everyone, at the push of a button. Somehow, these fluctuating energies cover the island in a sort of melancholy, and the island becomes the site of unrequited love, of an insufficient love, of an excessive love.

E.P.: Do you think this change in gender - in fact, the inclusion of a character in a sexual minority (and, thus, in a discriminated category) - will influence the reception or even the proportions of Malvolia's drama?

B.N.: I think that, whether we're talking about a minority or a majority, betrayal hurts just as badly. Regardless of one's sexual, political, or religious orientation. In fact, Malvolia is betrayed by her group of friends, which seems to me much more important than other aspects which, indeed, have their own significance, because we still live in a society that only appears to accept everything; instead, there is still a lot of cruelty in all of us. But this opens up new topics: What do values mean today? What do we understand by "European values"? What is our position in Europe, as a Balkan people? Is Europe the same safe and democratic place it used to be when the Ancient Greeks were around? This can become a much more elevated conversation, from my point of view. Here, we are debating our situation in a very changeable and violent world. Shakespeare himself is violent here. In fact, in those years, when a foreigner entered London, they walked down London Bridge, where people were hanged. This was London's way of wishing you "Welcome!" And unfortunately, we are not that far from that specific greeting today.

E.P.: Speaking of our place in the grand European scheme, in Shakespeare's play Illyria is a geographically ambiguous space, as is the characters' national identity. Where and who are they in this show?

B.N.: We opted for a universally contemporary world. This can be the Illyria of our minds and imaginations - if we think of the letter that Malvolia gets and which, from our point of view, goes beyond her imagination. It is a palpable yet ephemeral place. I define this Illyria as the life of a butterfly, who ends up being stuck in an insectary and has the chance to somehow continue its existence for who knows how long. That's frightening in Shakespeare's work - these characters, regardless of the context or the historical period, don't really sleep even when they are asleep.

E.P.: Regarding the adaptation of Shakespeare's play, why did you opt for using two different translations? What more do they bring to the script?

B.N.: From my point of view, it would have been best to have a special translation for this very show. I believe in retranslations for projects of this caliber. In fact, I think a text should be retranslated every three-five years. A lot changes: three years ago, we were in the middle of a pandemic; in Shakespeare's times, there was the plague... The irony is that Shakespeare did not use the plague as a pretext in any of his texts. So, we chose to use a combination of two translations, which favors the highly poetic dimension of certain characters - like Orsino, Olivia, Feste - who are much more introverted, somehow. And this introversion creates an openness towards more complex universes. Here, I felt that Mihnea Gheorghiu's version was more organic. But regarding the very direct dialogues, which make the plot develop, we opted for George Volceanov and Violeta Popa's translation. But together with the actors, we also kept an eye on the English text. And everything has, to me, a kind of balance, because the show will also be very poetic, while including concrete elements, with a simple, clear direction, which the spectators need to catch "as they go", because Shakespeare often writes in visual images.  His dialogues are actually interior images, like a film unfolding in your mind as you listen to the text. And it seemed so interesting to me: how can I, as a theater maker, extract the spectator from their own film and insert them in ours?

E.P.: Space and visual elements have always had a special significance in your shows. How do they manifest this time?

B.N.: In The Twelfth Night there are many sudden changes - place, characters... Everything happens all of a sudden and without logical explanation, which is wonderful, because what Shakespeare's mind produced is almost postdramatic, very exciting to me, as a director. There is, in the play, a sort of temporal chaos, which reminds me of Christopher Nolan's films, especially Tenet, where time is granted an entirely different relevance. And it was very important that our space should bear the traces of sadness, of a melancholy you cannot really explain or grasp. Of abandonment. There are libraries, or even coffee shops, which we enter and immediately feel more melancholic, without knowing why. I wanted to create a space which the spectator will want to enter. Unlike my other shows, this space is rather static, without major changes, because that would have been tiring for the audience. The point is to highlight the changes undergone by the characters and the situations, while the space simply hosts these inexplicable things, like that weird gate in Lynch's Twin Peaks. It is a space in which we feel the perfume of a love engulfing the entire text, but there is also a sense of decay, which can be reassuring in our times.

E.P.: What is the role of the sound landscape in this show?

B.N.: In our sound dramaturgy, the composer Claudiu Ursu and I believe that sound must open up the space and introduce the characters. Sound becomes, in its turn, a protagonist. If we go to the park in the morning, perhaps in the evening we will remember the chirping of birds. This sensation interests me in theater, as well: the fact that a week later you can remember a sound, which will transport you to a certain forgotten dimension of our existence, acting like a trigger, a "click". In fact, the sound is a "click" that can occur in one's forgotten childhood, out of fear of the future or anguish. In my shows, especially those I worked on with Claudiu Ursu, the sound landscape is meant to connect the temporalities between which we travel.

E.P.: What are the differences between the show you imagined and the show that came to be once you started rehearsals and actually working on every scene?

B.N.: We kept the ending. Other than that, the show became much more comical than I thought it would be, which I am glad about, because it means we captured certain relaxed situations, which we allowed to unfold on their own. And I also think we tried to be as honest as possible. We wanted the characters' suffering to be "real". Orsino truly suffers because he doesn't know whom to love and is in fact infatuated with the very notion of love. He suffers and he enjoys it. Anyway, the show has become a much more comical, relaxed, and authentic archipelago than I thought it would be when we started working on it.

E.P.: This idea of enjoying suffering is very interesting. Does it apply to the other characters, as well, especially Olivia?

B.N.: From my point of view, Orsino and Olivia are mirroring characters, who both enjoy suffering. But Antonio also suffers, because he loves Sebastian and is, in fact, the only one without a partner in the lovers' happy ending. Malvolia also suffers because of what is happening to her.... But I think, in a way, we have gotten used to indulging in or even forgetting about suffering. We live in a world that teaches us, especially through dating apps, that there is always someone better, that we can choose someone better. And this ends up affecting us, because we no longer have anything concrete to hang on to. As Matei Vișniec says, the sickness of this century is that we don't carry out what we begin. The world keeps experiencing many beginnings, the enthusiasm of these beginnings and nothing more.  

E.P.: Do Shakespeare's characters experience this enthusiasm of the beginnings? Does love fade away alongside the enthusiasm in the end?

B.N.: In the end, I opt for the exposure and comical effect of "falling in love at first sight". By the end of the show, everyone has had the chance to be with everyone else. This is the direction we chose.

E.P.: Is this what you meant when you said you kept the ending?

B.N.: Not necessarily. The ending in my mind, which will also appear in the show, was a Caruso sung by Feste - played by Anca Hanu.

E.P.: You were saying that the show has turned out to be much more comical than you thought it would be. What was the role of the actors in bringing the show to life and adapting it for the stage?

B.N.: An essential role. And I think I never had such good chemistry with the cast in my previous projects. Every rehearsal was so organic, going from point A to point B! Or, on the contrary, we stopped organically. We came up against scenes that were difficult to understand, we went through those crises together. From my point of view, this is a collaboration or, rather, an encounter like a trip through the dessert, which we took together. And everything seemed so easy that we never noticed the wind, the heat, the cold nights. We shared our water, and we all made it to the end. This was an immense source of joy for me, for my team... And, more than anything else, it will be a source of joy for the spectators, because I am certain they will feel this energy.