Metatheatrics

"I wrote I, Malvolio for commission for Singapore and Brighton Festivals in 2010 and I opened it in a school in Brighton, then it started to smoulder, and then it kind of ignited!” The ignition is a metaphor for the international attention garnered by his series of plays that put the focus on a minor character in a major work of theatre taken from Shakespeare's canon: I, Caliban, I, Peaseblossom and I, Banquo, and I, Malvolio, a one-man re-imagining of Twelfth Night from the point of view of Shakespeare's antagonistic steward.

“They're slowly starting to catch fire again,” says Crouch. “I've just taken my Peaseblossom piece – Peaseblossom being a minor, minor character in A Midsummer Night's Dream – I've just been in New York with him for two weeks and people are sniffing around him again. I wrote that in 2004, when I was a young man, with a full head of hair – that's not true, I was a young man.”

Despite the fact that for a large portion of the show Crouch has him clad in urine-stained long johns, it seems people never stopped sniffing Malvolio, an odious tormentee used by Crouch to examine prudery, bullying and the loss of dignity. Following Brighton and Singapore Festivals, there was a run at Edinburgh, then Crouch took it off-Broadway at the start of this year, before bringing the show to Brisbane Festival in September.

“It has this weird mixed appeal with adults and with youngsters as well; it was written for ages 11-plus, and then in Sydney I'm doing a ten o'clock late night version which I will enter into very effortlessly, really, because it's quite adult anyway,” Crouch muses.

Complete with suicide attempts and cruel practical jokes the content certainly seems adult enough, and that's without even considering the sophisticated and intricate nature of what the work is actually saying. “It's quite a dark metatheatrical piece, really. The lesson from that is that children can deal with that stuff much easier than adults think.”

I, Malvolio was written concurrently to another work The Author; Crouch says the former acted as a release valve for the 'very adult' latter.

“I wouldn't want anyone under the age of 18 to see The Author,” Crouch presses, “Malvolio has a similar sort of theme, looking at what happens when a group of people choose to watch something, you know, where's their responsibility for what they choose to look at? Particularly if what they're looking at is an act of cruelty. In Malvolio there are many acts of cruelty. I encourage the audience to laugh uproariously at that cruelty and then I kind of stick a knife in their laughter and puncture it as much as I can, get them to think about why they hell they're laughing. Empathy goes out the window when you're laughing.”