You can see why director Gordon Barr chose to set Twelfth Night in the wings of a theatre. Heather Grace Currie’s design – all ropes, dressing-room lights and velvet curtains – places Shakespeare’s comedy in a world of pretence. All it takes is a new costume from the wardrobe, and your identity has changed.
This is not just responsive to the play’s theme about the unreliability of outward appearances – whether that be the confusion sown by identical twins or the embarrassment of a man tricked into wearing the wrong clothes. It is also, with a cast of six, a pragmatic way of fielding the key characters. If it means by the end we are watching Jennifer Dick as Orsino (a woman playing a man) falling for Stephanie McGregor as Viola (a woman playing a woman who has just been pretending to be a man), well, it only adds to the merry questioning of the true nature of love. [READ MORE]