Sir Toby Belch Twelfth Night Essay

A new staging of Twelfth Night, co-produced by the Prague Shakespeare Company and Houston’s Main Street Theatre, seems to sidestep the challenges presented by Shakespeare’s elegant balance of comedy and melancholy by dwelling on the comic subplot that features Sir Toby Belch. Sir Toby, Shakespeare’s inebriated, impecunious knight, has more lines than any other character in this play, so his role has the potential to co-opt the play’s dark exploration of the cruel plot perpetrated against Malvolio. In director Rebecca Greene Udden’s version of Shakespeare’s final Elizabethan comedy, Sir Toby Belch’s drinking, frolicking, and belching is so extreme that it even involves the audience on several occasions. Her emphasis is in line with the play’s association with English pre-Lenten celebration that involved eating, songs, dance, masques, and

He presides over his own “court” of sycophants, including Maria (Olivia’s gentlewoman), Sir Andrew Aguecheek (his drinking companion), and Fabian (Olivia’s gentleman). We might associate Sir Toby with the good and the bad of unbridled indulgence in the pre-Lenten season. By contrast, Malvolio, Olivia’s lead servant and a paragon of abstinence, disapproves of the merrymaking of Sir Toby and his lot. Tiring of Malvolio's pompous ways, Maria forges a letter, ostensibly written by Olivia, and dupes The Steward into believing that her mistress has designs on him. Actor Guy Roberts transforms Sir Toby Belch into a cavorting and gamboling buffoon who hides flasks of drink in every imaginable crevice on his body and his kinswoman's house, even filching a bottle of beer that belonged to a bemused spectator during Thursday night’s performance. Carrying out Maria’s practical joke, actor Bree Welch offers a cleverly understated counterpoint to Roberts’ overly raucous