SOURCE: A review of Twelfth Night in Independent on Sunday. March 3, 1991. Reprinted in London Theatre Record, Vol. XI, No. 5, February 26-March 11, 1991, pp. 256-57.

Anyone who has kept up with the Shakespearian repertory over the past 15 years will have noticed a gradual erosion of the old boundary between the "dark comedies" and their popular counterparts. As You Like It now plunges the pastoral refugees into worse conditions than those they left behind; Much Ado About Nothing celebrates the union of two dislikeable, sharp-tongued wall-flowers, while Twelfth Night has been all but engulfed in cruelty, pain, and the sense of mortal transience.

Peter Hall's production calls a halt to this process. Nobody will shed any tears for Eric Porter's fatuously capering Malvolio; or recoil from the sadistic brutality of Dins-dale Landen's relentlessly genial Sir Toby. The show is out to reclaim the play's lost territory. It does nothing to gratify...