The keys to the triumph of this production, for triumph it is, are the casting, which is pure genius, and the direction, which is no less so. It is hard to think of a more carefully thought-out selection of actors, better suited, more fittingly attuned and apt, more gifted and skilled. It goes without saying that Richard Wilson was born to be Malvolio. Every inch the would-be Aristotelian megalopsychos, he is genuinely tragic at last: the agony of humiliation and disappointment are palpable, not least in the silence of the closing moments of the play when he shares the stage with that other hint of tragedy, Feste, the two in the darkening space, separate and alone.
      But what a Viola! And what an Olivia! How well played are Orsino, Belch, Aguecheek, Feste! The find of the night is Nancy Carroll. She is superb as Cesario; many of the cross-dressed girls-as-boys who have trodden the Shakespearean boards in the forty years of this reviewer’s spectating have been good, if prone - for entirely natural reasons - to caricature adolescent masculinity as the supposed state of the case. They forget that the parts were written not for girls playing boys, but boys playing girls playing boys. Carroll is an Elizabethan boy cross-cross-dressing, exquisitely. One is at one with Olivia’s response to the person that emerges: a highly intelligent, quick, feeling, beauteous youth, lighting the stage with his/her presence, a delight.
      And Alexandra Gilbreath is an equally wonderful Olivia. She ranges across the wide palette of manners and emotions found in the part by her and director Gregory Doran, from the hauteur of the formal lady to the infatuated woman, from anger to desire, from countess to impatient bride, with quicksilver confidence. The scenes between Olivia and Cesario, between Cesario and Orsino, and among the comics, are all better than excellent.
      This is a very funny play, the knock-about interludes (often the only bits of Shakespeare that are longuers) work well in this production not just because of the delicious writing in the comedy of Belch and Aguecheek, but because of how McCabe and Fleet inhabit the parts, aided by the energy of Miltos Yerolemou’s Feste. Paul Englishby’s music for Feste’s songs is a success likewise, a real embellishment.
      The Malvolio discovered by Wilson and Doran does not deserve the cruelty of the jape that humiliates him. He is only ridiculous when yellow-stockinged and cross-gartered; in construing the false letter that leads him to his downfall he does what any steward might, hoping to rise by the seemingly-proffered means. In prison, pleading with Feste for light, paper and ink, and in his final interview with Olivia, there is real pathos. He gives the dark bass note to an otherwise tumultuous comedy of entanglements, misunderstandings and deliberately false directions, all stemming from an accident followed by a necessity: Viola’s shipwreck on Illyria’s shore, and her fateful disguise as Cesario.
      Shakespeare himself had twin offspring, baptised in Stratford in 1585. One of the members of the theatre company for which he wrote had heard first-hand of the ambiguous Illyrian hinterland, a suitable place for the tangled web of deception to be spun and then cut by the mysteries of twinhood, the suddenness of infatuation, and the yearnings of desire. Scholars think it improbable that Shakespeare read the play’s original source, ‘Gl’Ingannati’ (‘The Deceived’) itself, getting it instead through Barnabe Riche’s ‘Apolonius and Silla’. But it is of course his incomparabilities that make it resound with such good things - ‘so full of quotations’ as the joke has it.
      This is a ‘Twelfth Night’ that teaches how ‘Twelfth Night’ should be. It is superlatively good; for devotees of Shakespeare and the RSC, and for theatre in general, it is an absolute must.
AC Grayling