SOURCE: A review of Twelfth Night in Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespearian Study and Production, Vol. 37, 1984, pp. 164-65.

The set of Twelfth Night was part ruined garden, part graveyard. A vast autumnal tree overshadowed (for Orsino's court) a pair of rusting gates and (for Olivia's house) a mortuary chapel. Sarah Berger's black-gowned Olivia was ostentatiously in mourning for her dead brother, while Miles Anderson gave us an appropriately violent, sombre, and austere Orsino. Fabian was an old man, Feste a pensive intellectual.

Malvolio apart, the other clowns were correspondingly subdued. Daniel Massey played a gawky but soft-hearted Aguecheek, afflicted by fits of depression and easily moved to tears. John Thaw, as Toby Belch, was an upper-class thug, hearty rather than jovial, more cruel than comic. The drunk scenes were very drunk indeed and the uproar so uproarious that it could only be curtailed by blasts on...