SOURCE: A review of Twelfth Night in Plays & Players, No. 373, October, 1984, p. 25.

Ever since Derek Jacobi's Cyrano spent the last act of that great production trying to keep his head above a sea of fallen leaves, the RSC has been obsessed by autumnal melancholy. Twelfth Night which has now come to the Barbican from last year at Stratford (with a couple of major casting changes) does admittedly begin to approach winter, but not the winter of indoor and jovial court charades generally suggested by the title. Instead the lights go up on Robin Don's wonderful set to reveal a bleak and wind-swept cliff-top with, at left, a huge wrought-iron gate from behind which you half-expect to see emerge not the gently mournful Olivia but instead the Baron Frankenstein or at the very least Mrs Danvers with news that Manderley is on fire at last.

The director John Caird...