SOURCE: "Surprisingly Lively Night," in The Times, London, April 11, 1988, p. 14.

John Carlisle's Malvolio (replacing Antony Sher) is the only major cast change in Bill Alexander's production since Jeremy Kingston reviewed it in Stratford last July; but the immediate impression is that its characters are meeting for the first time.

Nothing quite fits. There is a distracted, hollow-eyed Viola (Harriet Walter) who suggests more the last act of a tragedy than the opening of a comedy. Donald Sumpter's Orsino is a grizzled autocrat with none of the expected marks of a romantic lover. In years, at least, he is a match for Deborah Findlay's Olivia; but it then comes as a shock to meet her uncle Toby (Roger Allam) who could be half her age.

Feste (Bruce Alexander) is another middle-aged figure who pushes the privileges of folly to the limit of sardonic bombast and haunts the Illyrian courts...