Ben Kingsley as Feste
An Inspiring Performance of the Mystical Fool in Twelfth Night
Trevor Nunn’s 1996 film of Twelfth Night made Feste the Fool (played by Ben Kinglsye) one of the play’s central characters. Kingley’s voice was the first heard is the film, speaking a specially-written prologue which included the chorus from “The rain it raineth every day” and offered to “tell you a tale, now list to me...but merry or sad, which shall it be?” The prologue continued to narrate the play’s “back-story”, before Feste appeared sitting on a cliff above the beach where Viola was washed up. (As she revealed her disguise at the end of the play, he returned to her a necklace the audience had seen her leave on the beach.) The whole effect cast Twelfth Night as a ballad or tale delivered by Feste to the audience. The end produced a similar effect, as Kingsley strolled past the characters going their separate ways, singing “The rain it raineth every day”, and directly addressing the audience as the “you” whom the play will strive to please. It’s interesting to see film techniques being used to achieve the kind of easy metatheatre which was common at the Globe, but which was discouraged by later staging conditions.
Along with this “framing” of the film by Feste, Nunn involved him further in the match between Maria and Sir Toby Belch. Much was made of his line “if Sir Toby would leave drinking, thou wert as witty a piece of Eve’s flash as any in Illyria” (I.5).
He placed Maria already with the carousers in II.3. when Feste sings the lovesong, and Maria joined in the last verse, emphasizing “in delay there lies no plenty/ then come kiss me”. Kingsley’s singing was a tour de force: he balanced its obvious significance for those in the room with an impression that Feste had his own reasons for singing this particular song – an almost passionate melancholy came through.
Later, whilst singing the song “I am gone, sir” from IV.2, Feste peeked through the slitted window of a church to see Sir Toby and Maria at the altar, so he and the audience knew of the match before Fabian announced it during the denouement. His final song took him past the pair taking their luggage off in a carriage, adding to the impression of their romance as a minor sub-plot which Feste had engineered amidst all the other scheming in the play.
Kingsley was a suggestive choice to play Feste. Aside from being a heavyweight actor, who managed to maintain a close rapport with the audience, his most famous role previously had been his Oscar-winning depiction of Mahatma Gandhi. His shaven-headed, piercing-eyed Feste brought something of the previous role with it. Trevor Nunn obviously had a vision of Feste as an elusive and mystical fool, and Ben Kingsley realised that vision magnificently.
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