SOURCE: A review of Twelfth Night in Cahiers Élisa-béthains, No. 40, October, 1991, pp. 80-2.

In its potted history of the Playhouse Theatre, the programme boasts that 1988 was the year in which "Jeffrey Archer, politician, novelist and playwright, acquires the controlling interest in the Playhouse". For those on the Left in England, Archer's threefold description might sound slightly exaggerated, perceived, as he is, as a Tory-party fundraiser and writer of potboilers, but, be that as it may, he is now the controlling share-holder in a newly reopened theatre.

Archer's theatre houses everything one might expect. Gaggles of beautifully turned-out public-school children, besuited businessmen and furred, ostentatiously encrusted, and almost unfeasibly hugely shoulder-padded women. At the risk of sounding like Jimmy Porter, there is something about this kind of theatre that smacks unembarrassedly of privilege. "From 1991", the programme triumphs, "the Playhouse will be the home of the Peter Hall Company...