Review: Twelfth Night - RSC at Stratford

Twelfth Night

Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford

Two blokes with truly terrible voices wander on to the stage and sing a weedy protest song about oil exploration. It's not the play. It's a demonstration against BP, sponsors of the World Shakespeare Festival 2012.

Protestors have bought tickets to get into several performances at Stratford. The RSC has taken the decision to let them sing their song and leave quietly before the show rather than chuck them out.

BP must be thrilled. Sponsors can spend millions supporting the arts and hardly get a mention. By now, thousands of visitors to Stratford are aware that they have BP to thank for this delightful show.

David Farr directs a brilliantly inventive comedy with not a wasted second. It crackles with action from the opening moments, when the shipwrecked Viola (Emily Taaffe) emerges gasping from the sea - splashing the front rows - to the final tearjerking chorus of The Wind and the Rain by Feste (Kevin McMonagle).

In Shakespeare's day this was a play about lords and ladies. Today it's the comics who steal the show. Nicholas Day is a wonderfully drunken Toby Belch and Bruce Mackinnon a satisfyingly cowardly Sir Andrew Aguecheek.

But it is Jonathan Slinger as the pompous and punctured Malvolio who bares almost everything to deliver a fine performance that makes us laugh and cry. The script calls for him to be in yellow stockings, cross-gartered. Somehow, a posing pouch and suspenders have crept in to the action. The capacity audience loved it.

The production runs until October 6.

By Peter Rhodes