Review: Yellow, EdFringe

Set in a down-at-heel London law firm, Yellow is not so much a reimagining as a spinoff from Twelfth Night which ponders what happened to Malvolio after the embarrassing episode with the yellow cross-garters. The show opens with law firm owner Toby (Peter Wilding) singing along to Coldplay with such absorption that he misses the quiet knock of new lawyer Rosie (Heli Pärna), a finance expert, arriving for her first day. Toby is a bluff and hearty man with a chaffing good humour, generosity to his employees, and a kind heart which sees him take on his old school mate Mal (Yorgos Filippakis) after his fall from grace as a political advisor.

Rosie has been employed to make a scandal go away: one of Toby’s clients has been selling dubious financial incentives, inciting the elderly to believe in the dream of great riches despite the investments being fantastically, foolishly risky. Rosie accepts the work with some trepidation, later saying she retrained to be a lawyer precisely so she could dull her inconvenient feelings and just go home to watch Strictly at the end of the day. We never really find out why she’s so razor-keen to blunt her emotions – her subdued passion for environmentalism, perhaps, or the failed marriage in which her husband only did nice things for her when he felt like it or when “someone else was watching.”

Mal is a loner who lives for his work, never getting involved in the playful teasing or passionate politicking of his younger colleagues. Rosie eventually succeeds in drawing him out one-on-one, where he reveals his shattered dignity beautifully, showing us just why he’s built up an anonymous shell of professionalism around himself, never questioning the moral choices underlying the firm’s cases. But Rosie presents a new opportunity, someone for whom he might find the unswerving loyalty he once felt for his former boss Olivia. The end, though, is not a neat romantic comedy tied up in a bow: the end is about choices, and about what we must leave behind in order to take certain paths – or what we must carry with us to take others.

I’ve always felt a pang for poor Malvolio, who is by his own reckoning and that of Olivia in Twelfth Night “most notoriously abused.” In this production Mal is a political guard dog who has been put out to pasture for the sin of misreading romantic signals, rather than the upstart little fusspot of the original who overreaches his station with his ambitions, and his downfall is facilitated by a more calculating stab in the back than an unkind prank carried too far.

The writing at times leans towards speechifying about big concepts (Politics! Fascist Police States! The Proletariat!), giving a bit of a sense of Emoting with a Capital ‘E’. Filippakis as Mal navigates this with fluency and naturalism, particularly when exposing the secrets of his innermost heart rather than standing on the abstract moral questions that form the other half of the show. I would like to say this is the other emotional half of the show, but though the question of how to portion out blame for the gulling of elderly pensioners is an interesting one, this side of the production doesn’t quite achieve the emotional heights and depths towards which it aims.

Cast: Ilona Hendrix, Aravind Dhakshinamoorthy, Peter Wilding, Heli Pärna, Yorgos Filippakis

Written by: Geoffrey Mamdani
Produced by: Cross-Gartered Players

Yellow plays at EdFringe until Saturday 23 August.