The show is played with six  actors, who merge acoustic music with spoken language revealing the pain and ecstasy of falling in love for the first time. The actors play all the music; they never leave the stage. Our tale explores love’s madness and our deep human need for music, as the love stories are played out, a seemingly harmless prank goes horribly wrong resulting in a tragic fall from grace.

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Our Twelfth Night is a direct response to our last show – Hamlet, and has at it’s heart an homage to Primo Levi’s explorations of The Drowned and the Saved. At the end of our production of Hamlet the ghost of the drowned Ophelia walks the stage as she haunts Laertes, speaking her own narrative to her brother. We begin Twelfth Night with the same iconography, the near drowned Viola searching for her brother, only to be saved from tragedy and welcomed into Illyria with a freezing cold bucket of water, a clown and a musical odyssey. Shakespeare wrote both plays in the same year; echoes of love and madness appear to speak to each other across the two stories. The drowned Ophelia becomes the Saved Viola. Saved through music and love.

With nothing but benches to sit on, instruments to play and costumes and props that may have been washed up on a beach, our production is entirely site sympathetic. The actors create an authentic, funny and moving experience for a 21st Century audience.

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