Abstract
This entry examines Tim Supple’s 2003 television adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1602), focusing on its multiracial cast, its inclusion of dialogue in Hindi, and its portrayal of immigration. The film was commissioned for students by the British television network ITV, and it was accompanied by a documentary and an educational supplement. The film departs from other cinematic adaptations of Twelfth Night by presenting Sebastian and Viola as immigrants who seek refuge in Illyria after a violent coup forces them to leave their home country. It features a multiracial cast, including a Black British Orsino (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and British Asian Viola (Parminder Nagra), Sebastian (Ronny Jhutti), and Feste (Zubin Varla), who perform alongside white actors in the roles of Olivia (Claire Price), Sir Toby (David Troughton), and Malvolio (Michael Maloney). Tim Supple’s Twelfth Night participates in the early twenty-first-century vogue for multicultural Shakespeare and draws attention to the forces that led to its demise with the vote for Brexit in 2016.
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References
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Further Reading
Greenhalgh, Susanne, and Robert Shaughnessy. 2006. Our Shakespeares: British television and the strains of multiculturalism. In Screening Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Harvie, Jen. 2005. Bollywood in Britain. In Staging the UK. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Hingorani, Dominic. 2010. British Asian theater: Dramaturgy, process, and performance, 2010. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Leonard, Kendra Preston. 2014. The sounds of India in Supple’s Twelfth Night. In Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia, ed. Bollywood Shakespeares. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Modenessi, Alfredo Michel. 2008. This uncivil and unjust extent against thy peace: Tim Supple’s Twelfth Night or what violence will. Shakespeare Survey 61: 91–103.
Mookherjee, Taarini. 2020. ‘What country, friends, is this?’ The Indian accent vs. received pronunciation in productions of Twelfth Night. In Shakespeare and Accentism, ed. Adele Lee. Routledge.
Panjwani, Varsha. 2017. Not minding the gap: Intercultural Shakespeare in Britain. Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance 15: 43–57.
Singh, Jyotsna. 2019. Boundary crossings on the British Shakespearean stage. In Shakespeare and postcolonial theory. New York: Bloomsbury.
Trivedi, Poonam. 2010. Shakespeare and the Indian image(nary): Embod(y)ment in versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In Re-playing Shakespeare in Asia, ed. Poonam Trivedi and Minami Rutya. New York: Routledge.
———. 2020. Fooling around with Shakespeare: The curious case of ‘Indian’ Twelfth Nights. In The Routledge handbook of Shakespeare and global appropriation, ed. Sujata Iyengar and Miriam Jacobson. New York: Routledge.
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Mathur, M. (2020). Twelfth Night (Dir. Tim Supple, UK, 2003). In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Global Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99378-2_17-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99378-2_17-1
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(Dir. Tim Supple, UK, 2003)- Published:
- 03 June 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99378-2_17-2
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Twelfth Night (Dir. Tim Supple, UK, 2003)- Published:
- 08 December 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99378-2_17-1