#and I get reactionary ‘yes sir’ responses from guys a lot of the time

[theres-whump-in-that-nebula]

Ok so in relation to the previous post:

A customer (older butch lesbian(?)) flat-out told me (in a very kind, chill way) that I need to relax when I get off work and smoke some weed

I’m— [w h e E z e] god am I that tense-looking now? Djdjdjdjfjfjjdndjdndnd help

[oneweekobsession]

twelfth night at the nt - some miscellaneous thoughts:

- i liked it i really did - tamsin greig pretty much smashed it - your man who is toby belch it felt like his performance was like the epitome of the shakespearean male comedy actor but voiced by trigger from only fools and horses. it grated a bit. - they did the songs well

- i hate how exposition heavy the play can be and those moments that properly clunk like when sebastian's explaining what happened to his sister in the shipwreck to antonio and how sad he is like come on guys did you not even get a bit close to talking in the last three months did antonio not see you were a bit sad then - (i think there's probably a great lost play on the adventures of sebastian-as-roderigo and antonio though) - the juxtaposition of malvolia's declaration that she is not mad and sebastian questioning whether he is mad or not is something that i don't think i'd quite caught before - i think i need to think more about why i'm generally happy to go along with the mistreatment (both by the play and by characters in the play, if that's a distinction that makes sense) of sir andew aguecheek but not that of malvolio or malvolia. also this was a pretty good sir andrew. - the repurposing of malvolia's speech in 2.5 from one about cross-class marriages between women and their male stewards or employees to one about same-sex marriages, and her use of that as a precedent for her own feelings for olivia was a touch i really liked -but i think it causes problems for the rest of the play, because it means the action is now taking place in a world in which same sex (or f/f) desire is acknowledged and can be formalized in the institution of marriage. this means that the play's closing down of other homosexual possibilities felt particularly reactionary - in this regard, the production did some work to figure orsino's behaviour as internalized homophobia but at the same time i felt that we were encouraged to laugh at him every time he performed accidental gay behaviour (rather than critiquing his responses to getting amorously intertwined with someone he thinks is a man) and that laughter is not much of a step away from actual homophobia on our part - similarly i thought the play completely overdid the visual comedy of malvolia's appearance in the yellow stocking scene: the automatic twirling nipple tassles were a step too far imo though apparently everyone else thought they were hilarious - i was not comfortable being made to laugh at malvolia in this scene because i knew the torture scene was coming up; the staging was cruel in its ridicule of malvolia in a way that i feel is allied to how belch et al are cruel in their torture of her; the play tells us that belch and co are cruel in their ridicule, but i’m not sure the staging was conscious of its own cruelty in its excessive humiliation of malvolia - i was pretty uncomfortable at the ways in which lesbian desire was made ridiculous here   - similarly in making malvolia lesbian and then having characters punish her for that desire eh man we're in really dangerous territory here - though for all of that the play did go some way in redeeming itself with an ending which in its staging was not an easy or simple reassertion of heteronormativity - special credit here to orsino for mixing up sebastian and cesario and getting rather more amorous with the one of them that is actually a man than the one who is only dressed as a man - i liked that for a lot of the final movements olivia didn't seem best pleased that she'd actually married a man, and full of remorse and sorrow and pity for what malvolia has gone through - and yes i am totally now headcanoning olivia/malvolia becoming a thing when olivia loses patience with sebastian (and when let’s face it sebastian goes back to antonio) - the play did a good job of showing how both the lesbian malvolia, and the gay antonio were, at the end, bereft: the gay man excluded from the heteronormative happy ending is such a shakespearean thing (well it happens in TN and Merchant of Venice anyway), and it's interesting to see the lesbian brought into that convention here - but something that i would very much welcome would be a version of the play which committed to a clearly lesbian olivia, who knows she is a lesbian, and who recognizes that 'cesario' is a girl trying to pass as a boy and who takes advantage of that by deciding to marry 'him' - (because what is her statement 'I cannot love him' if not the kind of statement that a lesbian would make; she goes on to admit that orsino has wealth, nobility, isn't too bad looking, pretty decent as a person - and yet she *cannot* love him. because she's a lesbian, and because he is a man) - pretty much i would like the malvolia version of the story with that explicitly lesbian olivia thank you - also something i would very much like are some scenes of malvolia (sans wig) in the Elephant gay bar. either before or after the story begins. (she goes there because it's where she can be herself; she’s completely in love with olivia so she never hooks up with anyone, but it’s a place she can let her hair down take her wig off)). i would pay much good money for this.