Twelfth Night

It is Shakespeare’s funniest play. And his loneliest. Twelfth Night asks how much of yourself you can invent before you lose track of who you are.

 

When shipwrecked Viola washes ashore with nothing but the clothes she’s standing in and a twin brother she’s certain has drowned, she reinvents herself as a young man, as you do. Ferrying love letters from her new employer to the object of his affection, Viola only falls harder for him herself. Meanwhile the late-night crowd around the pool decide to teach the humourless Malvolio a lesson, in a joke that stops being funny long before anyone stops playing it. And then a second survivor of that shipwreck walks in, looking uncannily like Viola.

 

Created by a dynamic duo making their directing debuts with Auckland Theatre Company, Katrina George (Malie Sāmoa, Pākehā) and Miriama McDowell (Ngāti Hine, Ngāpuhi), the production drops Shakespeare’s classic into a glamorous modern-day Illyria, a dazzling South Pacific resort where the sun never stops shining and everyone is a little lonelier than they look.

 

With a packed 2027 schedule, only a super short season for Twelfth Night is possible and we expect this to sell out.

 

Alongside our short public season are two weeks of performances just for schools, made possible by Woolf Fisher Trust and the Douglas Goodfellow Charitable Trust.