SOURCE: "A Warm Glow All Round," in The Observer, May 29, 1994, p. 9.

On the main Stratford stage, 'Doctor Feelgood' (Motto: 'Here's some Shakespeare, it won't hurt a bit') strikes again. The director Ian Judge has become the RSC's 'warm glow' specialist, and his Elizabethan, Stratfordian Twelfth Night is a third knockout RSC comedy experience following the surreal Comedy of Errors and the Edwardian Love's Labour's Lost (now running at the Barbican).

Emma Fielding's small, impetuous Viola is magically washed up in a cinematic flood on the shores of Illyria, Warwickshire. John Gunter's beguiling design (with fine costumes by Deirdre Clancy and superb lighting by David Hersey) places Clive Wood's Orsino in a tapestry-walled enclave with candelabra; and Olivia's palace, unambiguously, on Shakespeare's home patch, with a tantalising prospect of the medieval guild chapel, timbered façades of Scholar's Lane and, in the gulling of Malvolio, the barren, wintry flower...