SOURCE: Review of Twelfth Night in The Observer, March 3, 1991. Reprinted in London Theatre Record, Vol. XI, No. 5, February 26-March 11, 1991, p. 259.

It would be charming, but dishonest of me, to be complimentary about Twelfth Night at the Playhouse, the theatre you can never quite find near Charing Cross. There is simply no better Malvolio in the world than Eric Porter, who repeats the silkily incensed Puritan he first launched in the RSC's very first season in 1960 and repeated, more gustily, at the ill-fated St George's in Tufnell Park some years ago.

But all the rest is not so much dire as dull. This can be the most tedious of comedies if played without sex appeal and inventive comic inflection. It is here played without sex appeal and inventive comic inflection, although it is seductively designed by Timothy O'Brien. Sara Crowe's Olivia talks in a curdled, irritating voice similar to...