Today we have Rinde Eckert with us who is in the process of delivering a fantastic performance as Feste. Thank you. In the CSF production of Twelfth Night. Welcome. Thank you for being here. Thanks, great to be here. I'm excited to hear you talk about. So how has it been spending three months digging into this play, getting behind the eyes of this Feste guy? It's great. It's really been fun tackling Feste. Feste is a weird character, and traditionally, a difficult one to make work. One of the problems with a character like Feste is that as opposed to the others who are funny because they are funny characters, Feste is funny because he is being witty. But witty is not the most funny thing in the world. Generally, wit is not terribly funny. The other characters are far more funny than Feste is. So it's somewhat of a challenge to make Feste funny because Feste in and of himself is not very funny. You feel as the clown role and obligation to be funny? Because it's true that certainly in the later plays, the Shakespearean fool increasingly becomes, well, the touchstone of the truth-teller. Exactly. The truth-teller and Feste and this is not exactly the truth-teller. To a certain extent, he is, but he's not that developed truth-tellers of the later fools in Shakespeare. In a way, you can look at him like minutes circa 1601 maybe, it's when this is. It's not early in his [inaudible] , but it's not late either. But you feel it's Shakespeare exercising his wit. That's, of course, always a difficult proposition. But when you've decided to be the clown, and I think a lot of the mistakes people make with Feste and previous productions I've seen, is that they try and make him into something that Shakespeare didn't make him into. They try reading all sorts of things into him that Shakespeare actually didn't read into him. They're just trying to make him a character that has a through line. Very often they'll try and make him in love with Olivia because- Everybody else is. - everybody else is, so they try and make Feste. I think he is in love with her, but he's in love with her, he's admiring of her. But I also make him admiring of Viola as well. I think he admires virtue and I think he finds virtue in Olivia, and he finds virtue in Viola. So wherever he sees virtue, I think Feste acknowledges it and has a respect for it. I'm trying to play him like the guy who's the outside looking on, seeing what's going on, playing his role and being a clown, but he's also one of the things that I feel about Feste is he's the clown for the audience too. He is the audience, which is why in many of those instances, you'll see me mugging to the audience and when I'm asking for cash, when I'm begging for another coin, I look out at the audience go, "They're going to give me some money, I know it." Then he get something and then asks for more. "Let's see how far I can take this." Then I ask for more and say, "Can I get three times? Can we do this three times?" You're bringing them with you. There's nothing that says I have to come down and say, "Yes, he has heard this word, he says, 'Vent your folly elsewhere,' and I say, 'Vent my folly?'" Then I come down to the audience and go, "Vent my folly." He's heard that word of some great man and now applies it to a "vent my folly". Then I turned back into the scene, but it just says I'm your jester too. I am your jester. I am everybody's jester and as he says to Viola in that wonderful scene, "The fool should be as off with thy master as with my mistress." So I'm not apologizing for the fact that I go everywhere, "Foolery does walk about the orb like the sun, it shines everywhere." We all need this. I want to go back to that opening scene with Olivia where you immediately resumed the role of fool, which is to say you've been gone, where have you been? I love the idea that you, a traveling musician, just playing this traveling musician. But have you given thought to where he's been or what perspective he may have gotten? I took it to mean that he has been bouncing between houses and Orsino talks about him having played for him earlier. Since there's that later reference where "Where's that fool who sang so beautifully that thing?" So he refers to the fact that Feste has already been in his court singing. I'm assuming that even though he's paid by Olivia, to be fair, he is been moonlighting at Orsino's court and perhaps elsewhere, but I took it as a direct reference to that later reference of Orsino's that the fool was here before. It seems to me they have a kind of worldly perspective, or as you've already talked about, just gets that, that the world seems to live in shades of gray. Yeah. That's the thing, he understands human nature. Somebody in there has to understand someone who was the outsider can comment on the world that he find, the society he finds. That's an important function of art to do that and I think Shakespeare's making a point about his own art and the fact that Shakespeare doesn't take sides. I don't know of any instance where he took a political side in anything. He's kind to his villains. He's ambivalent about Malvolio. He obviously finds him incredibly vain and obnoxious and yet, in the end, he feels like, "Well, I don't know if he deserved that." Yeah. He asked us to feel for him. Yeah, he asked us to feel for him. He generally asks us to feel for all of these, it's the human condition. He understands the human condition and he says, "We aren't above this." By choosing a side, you say, "Well, this is inherently right," and he's, "Well, it might be right to a certain extent, but then we all know what happens." You gain a certain power and you think you're right, then all of a sudden, you become self-righteous and tyrannical and suddenly you're wrong. So he said and this happens over and over again with him. That's what makes him so endearing is his feeling for the human condition. It's not ambivalence, it's multivalence is what it is. He's multivalent. He sees all sides and what an important function that is for art within society. Satire is important, but it's also very important in satire to see as the comedia used to, "Everybody's a fool." Arlecchino may be in charge, but he's also got his weaknesses. That's the tradition of comedy that Shakespeare comes out of is that Italian comedia. All these characters that he paints so broadly are from the comedia, which he loves and very loved, I'm sure.
