SOURCE: "Please yourself," in New Stateman, Vol. 89, No. 2291, February 14, 1975, p. 218.

One only has to look at the set to know what Peter Gill thinks of most of the characters in the Twelfth Night he's directed for the RSC. There, on a rust-coloured wall, is a sketch of Narcissus, gloating over his reflection; and there he remains, while John Price's Orsino palpitates, Mary Rutherford's Olivia postures behind her veil, and Nicol Williamson's Malvolio falls so massively sick of self-love that 'distempered appetite' seems as inadequate a diagnosis of his symptoms as telling a leper he has dermatitis.

Even those who affect to care for other people are curiously unconvincing, as if they were more interested in their own emotion than in its supposed objects—or, indeed, than in the precise gender of those objects. Orsino vaguely fondles the boy Cesario, and Olivia, at the end, eyes Viola and Sebastian...