It is sometimes called a comedy of festive joy or a carnival comedy. A crazy festive and inverted world. All this madness revolves around love, of course. Love draws life from all of these fantasies, and it is fantasy itself. A ship-wreck divides the twins Viola and Sebastian. Viola, disguised as a boy and under the name Cesario, enters the service of Orsino, Duke of Illyria, as a page, and falls in love with him. However, he is in love with a rich and beautiful countess, Olivia. He sends Cesario to her as his messenger of love, and Olivia falls in love with this young mediator.
The plot gets tangled up when Sebastian appears, and Olivia, who considers him to be Cesario, secretly enters into marriage with him. This high-spirited festive comedy simply deals with various forms of love; it is full of cross-dressing, duels and humour.
Twelfth Night thus brings something for everyone; it depends on us whether we want to look at this human bustle through rose-coloured spectacles, or through sooty glass.
This late comedy by an experienced playwright is an unrestrained carnival slapstick comedy, poetically grotesque and ironic, but also somewhat bitter when it approaches tragedy. Its production at Brno City Theatre is another of those progressive productions which are trying to move the focus of interpretation and address also the spectators, who accept everything with a certain degree of restraint due to being tired by endless variations.
The subtitle 'or What You Will' admits that those who identified that the text contains a conglomeration of many characters and plots from the author's previous dramas were right.
