Sicken and So Die by Simon Brett

have observed, or heard, or seen. He was into everything just deep enough to get the soles of his shoes wet.
    For instance, he saw a mime artist busking in Covent Garden and was so impressed that he brought the guy in to advise the cast on movement. Then in an Indian restaurant, by chance, he heard some Eastern muzak which he decided had an authentic ‘dying fall’. He immediately engaged a sitar player to do the
Twelfth Night
music. Worse than that, he got the musician to reset Feste’s songs in some approximation to raga style. Chad Pearson gamely tried to ride the unfamiliar rhythms. He succeeded pretty well, but at the expense of audibility. The atmospheric, melancholy words of the songs were lost.
    In a way it was all very exciting – so long as you didn’t care about Shakespeare’s
Twelfth Night
. Charles Paris did, and he found the rehearsal process agonising. Every few minutes, it seemed, some other felicity of the play was sacrificed or obscured for a theatrical effect.
    Even Charles had to admit, though, that most of the effects were very striking. Alexandru Radulescu had an inspired visual sense. He created patterns of movement which were mesmerising and dramatic.
    But it was all independent of the text. He would have made as interesting a spectacle of the
Yellow Pages
as he was making of
Twelfth Night
. And Charles Paris would have much preferred them to be doing the
Yellow Pages
than a text he had cherished since his schooldays.
    The production’s opening moments were typical of the Radulescu approach. The dumb-show had survived and refined into something far less crude than first envisaged. All of the play’s characters took up positions in the blackout; then, to intricate Indian rhythms, moved like blank-faced automata into a variety of physical combinations. Their bodies had become inhuman, like components of some intricate metal puzzle. The mime, though it still had copulatory overtones, had taken on a universal and emblematic quality. But the precision of their ensemble movement could not fail to arrest an audience’s attention.
    The sitar music continued as the cast froze into a tableau, facing out front, chilling the audience with the blankness of their stares. Alexandru Radulescu had wanted this moment to echo his sketchy understanding of Noh Theatre, and only the vigilance of the Asphodel accountant had stopped him from commissioning traditional Japanese wooden masks for the entire cast.
    While his fellow-actors stayed immobile, Orsino then stepped forward and, with his staff, struck the stage three times (a convention borrowed from classical French theatre). He then intoned:
    â€˜If music be the food of love, play on:’
    â€˜On, on, on, on . . .’
    the rest of the rigid cast echoed in unison, their words tapering off to silence.
    â€˜Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting.
    The appetite may sicken, and so die.’
    â€˜Die, die, die, die . . .’
came the dwindling echo.
    â€˜That strain again!’
    â€˜Again, again, again, again . . .’
    â€˜
It had a dying fall.’
    â€˜Fall, fall, fall, fall.’
    â€˜O!’
    â€˜It came o ‘er my ear like the sweet sound
    That breathes upon a bank of violets.
    Stealing and giving odour.’
    â€˜Odour, odour, odour, odour . . .’
This time the echo was as soft as breath.
    â€˜Enough! no more.’
    Suddenly Orsino slammed his staff down on to the ground. All of the cast, except for the Duke and Curio, scattered off to the sides of the stage with the exaggerated, flickering movements of silent film.
    The Indian musician let out a long lamenting twang from his sitar, and Orsino was left to continue his speech in relatively traditional manner until Alexandru Radulescu’s next theatrical sensation.
    The effect was undeniably dramatic, but it had nothing to do with
Twelfth Night
.
    Charles’s position within the production was tense and difficult. Sir Toby Belch was a