SOURCE: A review of Twelfth Night in New Statesman, Vol. LIX, No. 1524, May, 1960, p. 788.

The revival of his 1958 production of Twelfth Night shows Peter Hall settling more comfortably than before on the throne of the Stratford Memorial Theatre. And it looks like being a good reign. When the season started, I suggested that his great virtue was his prime concern for Shakespeare's poetry. This means that the verse-speaking is neither hammed into rant and ripe elocutionism nor is it ironed out into prose; it is, instead, a medium for the feeling intelligence and demands nothing less from the actors. So the plays emerge less as galleries of types and characters than as creative statements, worlds of values. But at the same time, Hall is a great one for technical panache and high production: elaborate costumes and stage business, dim facades, period music—he proliferates the theatrical means into...