SOURCE: A review of Twelfth Night in The Guardian, December 5, 1987.

At first I thought we might be in for some shocks as Kenneth Branagh's production of Twelfth Night at the Riverside Studios reversed the order of Shakespeare's first two scenes. But it turns out to be a genial, generous actor-oriented production chiefly remarkable for its use of a Victorian Christmas setting and for Richard Briers's outstanding Malvolio, a cross between Mr Murdstone and Samuel Smiles.

The snow-flaked Christmas setting strikes me as very odd. It enables the designer, Bunny Christie, to fill the wide stage with white from Olivia's portals on the right to Orsino's tomb-decked manor on the left. It is also possible that the play was first performed as a post-Yule entertainment at Whitehall in 1601. But everything in it cries out summer. Olivia dismisses Malvolio's cross-gartered, yellow stockings as "mid-summer madness." Fabian describes Sir Andrew's challenge...