‘Toby Belch is Unwell’

From the moment he comes lurching down the aisle between the seated audience, bottle in hand, bawling and burping, staggering to the stage in piss-stained pants and a creased shirt bearing the spillages of several dinners you know you are in the company of Sir Toby Belch and he is indeed, unwell. As before, if you know the character from Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth Night’, you are simultaneously drawn to this licentious free spirit who, routinely, thumbs his nose at authority and ridicules social convention as we all would like to do, if only we had the nerve and repelled by the brutish arrogance and riotous chaos that threatens our ingrained belief in moderation and order.

Belch sprawls onto the stage drunk and raging to recount the events of Shakespeare’s play and, of course, justify his own outrageous behavior within it and blast once more the Steward Malvolio, the self-regarding Puritan and Toby’s nemesis. For all his rage Belch knows – as does the actor playing him – there is, in this play, no winner in the war between order and anarchy. Belch and the Steward, along with all the lighter people, as Malvolio calls them, which is to say everyone except the four characters at the top of the social pyramid will be dismissed from the stage, their stories not concluded, to make way for a gentrified celebration of romantic love, emphatically heterosexual, which is more than can be said for the titled celebrants.

If ‘Toby Belch Is Unwell’ was just a retelling of ‘Twelfth Night’ from the drunkard’s perspective it would be fun but rather a thin play, so once the play summary is complete the actor playing Belch introduces a new character, the actor playing Belch. There follows a kind of discussion about acting and theatre that would be a bit dry and academic but for the fact there’s a great deal of Sir Toby in the actor as there is, I’m sure, a lot of the actor in the knight. The extravagant excess barrels on through the admission that while the actors with household names and six figure bank accounts get to play the plot movers and shakers it’s the army of ‘poor players’, as Shakespeare called them in another play who strut and fret their hour upon the stage until they are heard no more,’ who must fill the hours with comic interludes and meandering sub-plots until the main narrative is finished and the curtain falls. Even a character as exciting as Toby is really no more than a diversion.

Why would any actor want to do this, the actor asks, and by the end an answer is given but I won’t say any more. No spoilers here. It’s enough to say the reason has nothing to do with the ego mania that actors are often accused of having.
Actors, both professional and amateur will have a special interest in this play but anyone with no more than a passing interest in theatre will remember, long after the question of what motivates an actor is forgotten, the barnstorming visceral excess of the unwell Toby Belch.