SOURCE: "Nightfall," in The Spectator, Vol. 223, No. 7366, August 30, 1969, pp. 279-80.

Devotees of the spectacular, or for that matter of pantomime and magic spangles, must have been especially pleased by the light, fantastic style devised this year at Stratford for Pericles and The Winter's Tale. Clearly a scheme based on these two plays, with Henry VIII to come, should ideally have included Cymbeline or, failing that, The Tempest and preferably both. Clearly, on the other hand, the kind of audiences who flock enthusiastically to Stratford might reasonably be expected to stand for only so much of Shakespeare's unfamiliar, and comparatively abstruse, last things. However entrancing they may be in practice, in theory the late romances are not what one might call box office gold. And so we have Twelfth Night which, one can't help feeling, must have been envisaged as something of a spanner in this season's works.

Whatever...