‘Important for developing the spirit of misrule, revelry, and gender fluidity that defined this production were Miriam Spring Davies’s costume designs, which relocated the production to an Albanian-style nineteenth-century “Illyria” that encompassed what we now know as Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Albania. Spring Davies drew upon Shakespeare’s idealized version of this area, described in private interview with the author as an “unusual, fantastical, and unknown land,” to create her intricate costuming…Such precise research, which referenced portraits similar to the Top Kapi Palace Museum’s collection of manuscript images of Osman I and Murad I, was a hallmark of Spring Davies’s costume choices. Several actors confirmed the positive impact that these costuming choices made on their ability to envision their characters in new and unexpected ways’
Stephanie Collins – Misrule and Melancholy: Stamford Shakespeare Company’s Gender-Bending Twelfth Night
Scene Magazine, 2019
