Twelfth Night

Gregory Doran's 'Twelfth Night' for the RSC is one to admire, rationally, but I found it impossible to fall in love with. That's a topsy-turvy sort of response to Shakespeare's swoony, subtle ensemble play, where everyone is mournful or moonstruck, and lovers' genders - and their intentions - bend before your eyes like a stick in seawater.

Doran relocates Shakespeare's make-believe coastal Dukedom, Illyria, to the Levant: a flamboyantly apt setting in that it combines martial passion and vaguely bisexual decadence, and is presided over by a Byronic Duke Orsino (Jo Stone-Fewings) who is delightfully manly: a powerful Romantic hero in thrall to love, instead of the usual deluded booby. Nancy Carroll plays his 'boy' servant, Cesario (actually a girl called Viola who has disguised herself as her twin brother following his apparent death in a shipwreck), and does so with thoroughly wholesome wit and grace. She is, thankfully, a shade too subtle to veer into the Principal Boy territory that so often comes with gentleman's hose. Orsino's snooty object of desire, the man-shunning countess Olivia, is also unusually mature in this production: Alexandra Gilbreath brings an earthy, breathless relish to the part which ripens delightfully into comedy when Olivia falls for the lovelorn Duke's messenger, a certain Cesario, (who completes the triangle by holding a secret flame for his/her master, Orsino).

What Doran's sluggish but clearly illustrated production lacks is a feeling of being enfathomed in the magic and melancholy of this shifting world, so full of true feeling and false faces. Every one of Shakespeare's characters - from Olivia's puritanical steward (a righteous and sympathetic Richard Wilson) to her sot of a brother, Sir Toby Belch - adds his unrequited note to the music of mistaken love. But it's only the posh characters who are in tune here. In particular, it's a woeful mistake to play the Fool, whose bittersweet songs and speeches act as the play's refrain, as a bad-tempered lout who is neither funny nor musically gifted. There's little revelry to be had in any of the boozy comic characters. Presented in a bedraggled chorus of half-arsed farting, pot lid-banging and mean-spirited pranks, they're as depressing as genuine alcoholics. When they trick Wilson's dignified, aghast Malvolio into believing his mistress is obsessed with him, a sub-plot that usually at least begins in sublime comic nonsense is a sour joke from start to finish. As 'Twelfth Night's go, this is definitely one for the new remorseful days of January rather than the merry last nights of the old year.