Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

Cast: Charlotte Cumming, Amber-Page Moss, Alice Colvin-Cousley, Catherine Fahy, Kyle Jensen. Christopher Hogan, Sandra Tschackert, Oliver Barden, Laurence D. Glover, Chrysanthi Fergani, Becky Brookfield, Simon Baron, Andrew Cecil, Annuncia Skeldon.

Shakespeare is not just about the characters, the most human way that the souls of each audience member are unfolded to reveal the essence of the writing by the master of verbal exchange and thought, nor is the exposure of a time that captures the imagination in a way that historical truth can fathom, but it must be in every situation about setting, about how the space available is utilised to its fullest effect by the director and actors without feeling as if you are contained by a wall, that you are not processing emotions behind the scenes of modern restraint.

To take a play such as Twelfth Night, to remove it from the inside view and place it within nature is to applaud the thought process of the creative team, to understand the biological effect of being almost free to be the secretive voyeur snatching upon conversations that you would never be normally be privy to as you are hidden from view by foliage and wildness of the manicured set.

The open-air production of Twelfth Night by Wanderlust Theatre Company at Marine Gardens in Waterloo was instinctive and intimate, a biological fairytale of mistaken identity and summer sexual tension that flowers as the mid afternoon started to turn the Waterloo sunset as it started to lower in the sky as the play came to its riveting finale.

Setting is important in a modern context to truly unravel our status and conditioning within environment, and as the questions of gender identity flows as a small breeze through the grasses, so the endorsement of the structure of the play takes hold on the audience; through various innuendo, conniving sexual embarrassment, the directions of Lauren Steele and Sandra Tschackert, and the overall production becomes clear.

With the effervescent souls of Catherine Fahy, Alice Colvin-Cousley, Christoper Hogan, and Amber-Page Moss, in the respective roles of Sir Toby Belch, Maria, Malvolio, and Olivia, catching the eye as the comedy of the piece makes its large baring visible, and Charlotte Cumming in the role of fated Viola dominates the ecological background, so the performance is to be enjoyed, to feel the resilience of theatre away from the internal and instead escalating the confidential is undeniably pleasurable.

Wanderlust Theatre Company’s own brilliance shines through the proceedings in such a way that the summer’s tribute is both class and atmospherically beguiling. Ian D. Hall