Twelfth Night

In his masterpiece, If this is a man, Primo Levi has a chapter named The Drowned and The Saved. In it, he tells us not of those who were literally saved from the gas chambers but rather those whose cellular attitude to life, their “bounce”, seemed to save them moment to moment. Shakespeare drowns Ophelia (his tragic young female protagonist) at the end of Hamlet, and he saves Viola (his comic young female protagonist) from drowning at the beginning of 12th Night. He wrote both plays around the same time. At the end of my production of Hamlet, Ophelia clung to a long ribbon of material – the length of the stage - walking as the ghost of her drowned self, haunting Laertes. At the beginning of my Twelfth Night, the same actress who had played Ophelia was again walking as if in death, but thirty seconds into the play a clown splashes her with a bucket of cold water, the carnival music begins, and she is saved. I understood Twelfth Night as the necessary “bounce back” from Hamlet, music is the food of love, and we must play on.