SOURCE: A review of Twelfth Night in The Independent, December 5, 1987. Reprinted in London Theatre Record, Vol. VII, No. 25, December 3 - 16, 1987, p. 1577.

Opal and taffeta—materials that flicker between one tinge and another—are both mentioned in Twelfth Night: appropriately for, placed at a time of the year when festivity shades back into sobriety, the play itself ceaselessly ripples between the bright and the sombre. Comic emotings clench into aching emotions. Appearances fluctuate, setting up undulations between pleasure and pain. It is entirely typical of the play's atmosphere that the songs of its clown, Feste, are forlorn.

Recognising all this, Kenneth Branagh's superlative production highlights it by setting the drama in nineteenth-century dress. The play's graver side gets translated into the Victorian preoccupation with mortality. Ivy-wreathed tombstones and a funerary monument form part of the scenery. The self-indulgent luxuriating in grief mocked by Twelfth Night is decked out in...