I'm excited to introduce Gareth Saxe who is currently playing Malvolio in Twelfth Night. Thanks for being here. Indeed. What have you learned? What do you think Malvolio's worldview is? Who is this guy and how did you get behind his eyes? As I think I also alluded to, a friend of mine gave me a beautiful book that Michael Pennington, who had spent many years at the RSC and famously played Hamlet and many other roles, but became a director and later in his life, wrote a book about Twelfth Night and his company's journey over several years and very successful production. One of the things that I was scared about the role is that I think you can very easily just swing into clown territory and it can live there. I have seen productions where it lived in that place and it was enjoyable. But there is something in that play, and I think it's Shakespeare not being able to help himself in the same regard that when he writes the Merchant of Venice, he sets about to write Shylock is a bogey man because Jew of Malta has come around and the Jews are being demonized and so on. He can't help himself but write a motivated full human being. I think he gets too excited and too interested, to imbue thoughts and feelings on him. But that's what reads to me from the text is and for Malvolio and due in large too Michael Pennington ideas about it, but also then my reading of it and seeing it. There's this much more intricate tapestry that's happening in this comedy and the deliciously, how to even encapsulated words, the inextricable illness of sorrow and happiness that just human condition is in the play and then whether overtly intended or not. Forgive me, my mind is pretty associative. So to go back to love that was lost, you have a brilliant crazy rollicking thing of people trying not to be in love and then being ridiculously in love to the point where they'll put on disguises, Russian hats and whatnot. Then all of a sudden, everything is about to be resolved and [inaudible] comes in and says, "Your father has died." What could be the purpose of that except I feel now later in my life, like Twelfth Night, these two things are inextricable and that Shakespeare can't help themselves. But see both sides of the coin. Yes, to actually even heightened the joy because there's this depth of sorrow that's there as well. So I feel like that's in Malvolio and in Twelfth Night, in Spades, in many of the other characters. Of course, you'll talk to [inaudible] and that he has hopefully many things to say about that, which he will. About fascinate, right? Yeah. So what I'm hearing you say, which I really like, is that you think that maybe Shakespeare's audiences might have recognized this character as a two-dimensional buffoon character. What Butler could actually fall for this ruse, and you're saying that you have found Shakespeare's warm country heart, that he has given him reasons or given him agency and has created a sympathetic character. I think so, he's the major dome. I think you can look at it from a completely self-involved, narcissistic way. I'm not trying to sanitize Malvolio, I think that's there too. But I do think there's an incredible amount of sympathy for people who are not of the upper rational line. It's heartbreak house, the Shaw play where Shaw talks about we're the only people who can truly afford to be bohemians are the ridiculously rich people because they have time to entertain these notions. So Olivia and Orsino can put on these affectations of love and grief, perhaps/ It's like check-off too. Yes. Exactly. It is beautiful, useless people. It's just there it goes. You have the time to ponder. Exactly. Existential dilemmas. I'm not quite sure. I don't have to get dinner right now because there are seven people serving, right? Yeah. But in Twelfth Night, you also have the households. So you have Malvolio is the major agent of that house functioning and that job is not inconsiderable at all and he's worked. I was always taught to go back and find the motivations for your character and be the advocate of the character. Yeah. So that's what I then I went back and tried to do the research on what a major general of a house that would have to do and it's enormous. You take care of absolutely everything. You're in charge of the money. You're in charge of when someone goes to market and what they buy and then how that gets on the table and how it's presented. You're basically running the show. You're managing a large state. So it seemed, it starts to build a picture for me of a guy who was like, 'I don't have any room to mess this up because I don't have any agency. So this has to go exactly like I say it has to go.' For good reason, was also on taking care of these people. She's in grief, she's lost her brother, her father, for God sakes, within the year. So what does all of this nonsense. Then he's confronted with the fact that Toby is of a different class than he is and so can behave as he pleases. But he is also disrupting the house and he's having to send people to the market constantly because Toby's eating him out of house and home and drinking him out of house and home. He's also trying to be a buffer. So I think there's huge amounts of stakes for Malvolio about, 'this has to go right and because there is nothing else for me.' Then all of a sudden. There's this letter. There's a letter. There's an insinuation that he might be able to aspire to something further or might be listed, some are born great, some achieve greatness, some have greatness thrust upon them. Yeah. All of a sudden that's wish fulfillment of a kind that people of Olivia's stature, of Toby's stature, Orsino stature can't, I think, even begin to understand, of what that is, what that would be, to be Count Malvolio having come from nothing. So in terms of this question of what is Malvolio's weakness or his vulnerability or his kryptonite, I think if you asked Toby or Maria, it's his pride. It's that he deserves more than he's allowed to have based on societal constraints. Right? Right. But you're also saying, yeah, but there's also he's trapped where he is and he's worked hard and he deserves to ascend. So it's a little bit of both. Right. Again, not to sanitize him, I do think he is contentious and self-important, but in the way that one who's not been gifted those things from birth can be. I think implicit in Malvolio's wanting to ascend he's also like, I could be loved in that way. Yeah. Do you think he loved her already? There are several characters in the play who have a thing for Olivia or do they have a thing for. I don't think that he's been available. All the things that come with being married. I don't think he's been able to entertain that. In my reading of him, I think he cares for her and she is basically all of his ways on that one in that house. But I don't think he's, because of his strictures and how he thinks things should go in the right way, he's not allowed himself to think that and then all of a sudden there's permission. There's no bank. Yeah. All of a sudden the floodgates, I think, open for somebody who has been so trapped in a way. That's my reading of all of him, and henceforth, the madness that comes from that. Well, okay. That's a great segue because the other big question I wanted to ask you about is this, the escalation of these practical jokes, Malvolio becomes the target of Toby and friends. Then, these things just escalate. What is the word? Cruelty is the word. Yeah. What is Shakespeare up to there? I actually love that you brought up Love's Labours Lost, and this idea of how Shakespeare, as he continues to write comedy and starts to put pressure on the form of a comedy by saying, "It's not going to end the way that you expect a comedy to end." This is one of the later comedies. There's a lot of darkness in this comedy and I think he's doing that same thing where he's pushing things. But I'd love to hear you talk about that. Why this cruelty and where is Shakespeare taking us? I wonder if there's not a reading of it where, Toby is a plague on my knees to take sorrow this way. I've totally misquoted it, but essentially, he starts the play with, "Why can't we just get really drunk and have a great time?" Yeah. But there's so much tension in that. I imbue it with that at least. I think there's a reading of it that Toby is overwhelmed with grief and cannot deal with grief,. Great. Is then driven to anger as sometimes the only case or a container that one can put grief into for some people who don't have access to sorrow. I wonder. Did that conversation come up in the room? No. But I feel it's implicit in some of the things that Robert is doing. I'm talking to him too. Are you? Yeah. I feel like that's there and is a possible reading of why that cruelty comes. It also is maybe also in a comment of somebody who's a keen observer of the social structure, who's like, you don't get to move, you don't move. You do what I say. If you step out of line, then we draw a quarter of you. Yeah. It's like we preserve the order. It's the argument that Richard the Second makes it such thetabolic brook, like, "Whoa, wait a second, I'm next in line to God." Yeah. "You don't get to tell me anything. I telling you." Yeah. That's great. I wonder if it's not a keen observation of that played out in the households in a much more familiar way.
