SOURCE: A review of Twelfth Night in The Times, London, April 22, 1955, p. 16.

Sir Laurence Olivier's interpretative resource is such that there was no guessing beforehand how he would choose to treat Malvolio; and the choice actually made—whether or not given theatrical validity—certainly took the Stratford first-night audience by surprise. It did not fall on the Puritan, whose portentous gravity is in itself a standing provocation to the fool-baiting Illyrians, a stiff spruce figure of preposterous pretensions. Nor on the insolent jackin-office, over-ambitious and overweening, properly put to his purgation. And not on the fantastic complex creature, twitching with distempered self-esteem and tortured by ambition, who gradually steals our sympathies from the over-zealous tricksters. The actor turned from these familiar personages to present a plain unlikeable man.

Sir Laurence's Malvolio is a shaven and cropped Round-head among laughing Cavaliers whose breeding he envies and whose frivolous manners...