Twelfth Night

If David Farr's RSC 'Tempest' is an ambitious stab at a delicate play, his 'Twelfth Night' is a jolly good take on a perfect one. Shakespeare's melancholy symphony of booze, gender-bending passion and unrequited love ebbs and flows on a salty tide of wit and tenderness. Farr's production, which finds its sea legs immediately, is rarely less than amusing and often hilarious. But the sadder, wiser elements of this wonderful play don't quite flourish in the comic sunshine.

Farr makes clever use of the onstage lift and stairs to manage the many great comic entrances and exits – the most memorable being made by Jonathan Slinger's puritan hate-figure, Malvolio, the subject of a tortuous practical joke which results in his donning outrageous yellow stockings in the unfounded hope of mating with his employer, the unenamoured countess Olivia.

Here, Malvolio's stockings are standard fetish wear, and the 'cross-garters' are rubber straps which strap this actor's naked buttocks together so tightly that his exit – up a very long flight of stairs – is painfully funny and exposed.

Slinger's slithery jobsworth goes a very long way for a laugh. But this is also a showcase for two excellent comediennes: young Emily Taaffe, who plays crossdressing heroine Viola with the cheeky charm of a wide-eyed Irish barrow boy; and the positively addictive Kirsty Bushell, whose wit, maturity and irony make the scenes in which she, the haughty Olivia, falls in love with the boy who Taaffe's Viola is pretending to be, the high point in a night of comic peaks.

And the leading lovers are propelled delightfully by erotic misunderstanding and excessive hopes, from their watery beginning, in which Taaffe's Viola emerges from a deep pool of seawater, spraying the front row with foam, to their dreamy, four-in-a-bed ending.