SOURCE: Jackson, Russell. Review of Twelfth Night. Shakespeare Quarterly 53, no. 4 (winter 2002): 536-49.

In the following excerpted review of the 2001 to 2002 Royal Shakespeare Company season at Stratford-upon-Avon, Jackson observes the erotic and decadent qualities of director Lindsay Posner's staging of Twelfth Night and highlights several individual performances, including Guy Henry's strangely empathetic Malvolio and Mark Hadfield's touching Feste.

[In the set designed by Ashley Martin-Davis for Lindsay Posner's Twelfth Night,] Olivia's household was represented permanently by the furnishing of [an] alcove on the right of the forestage: black furniture, including a piano, a grandfather clock, a small table, some austere chairs, and a row of ancestral photographs. There were also two telltale Beardsley drawings that slyly indicated her suppressed longings. Orsino's court was exclusively male and military, but he openly indulged himself in the tastes of a fin-de-siecle aesthete. After a mimed prologue representing the storm, in which two...