RSC Twelfth Night review - Weird and sometimes wonderful

​At least you cannot accuse them of playing it safe. It is Christmas, and the play is a comedy called Twelfth Night. A few hours of hearty and colourful festive fare to get one in the spirit, then?

Er, no. The programme says the production is directed by Prasanna Puwanarajah, but he seems to have been assisted by the filmmaker David Lynch and the ghost of the artist René Magritte. Any fans of old-fashioned ideas such as ‘sense’ are in for disappointment; but those of a more surrealist disposition may find much to admire. The only kinds of logic here are those of the dream and the nightmare.

The question is whether this approach suits the play, and one can argue that it does, because it is an odd play. There is riotousness and ribaldry; there is the comedy of confusion and mistaken identity; there is love, gentle and lustful. But there is also profound melancholy and terrible cruelty: at times, Shakespeare seems to turn the lights on the audience, challenging us to question what we find funny. There is an underlying mood of unease and unexpectedness, and this mood has evidently fired Puwanarajah’s imagination.

So there are various things that are unexplained and seem to refer to nothing. Two are especially prominent. At times, a man climbs a ladder and paints one side of the set black. And part way through the first half, a colossal pipe organ emerges, and remains for most of the duration; at its console sits a man in a Fair Isle cardigan. He plays sometimes portentously, sometimes frivolously. The production occasionally feels less like a play and more like a high-end art installation; the set and costumes are designed by James Cotterill and lit by Zoe Spurr with cinematic sophistication.

None of this however necessarily makes it fun. The play is populated by characters of questionable likeability, and few of the actors go out of their way to lend their roles warmth. Almost all of the charm here comes from Gwyneth Keyworth as Viola, who washes up on a shore, having been shipwrecked, her twin brother apparently lost at sea. Viola disguises herself as a man, Cesario, and finds work as a servant for Duke Orsino (Bally Gill), with whom she falls in love; but Countess Olivia (a spiky Freema Agyeman), whom Orsino has long courted, falls in love with Cesario. Also in Olivia’s household are her steward Malvolio, whose haughty ways induce hostility from Olivia’s uncle Sir Toby Belch (Joplin Sibtain, as gaseous as the character’s name suggests), Toby’s friend Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Demetri Goritsas) and the servants Maria, Fabian and Feste, one of the great sad clowns of theatre (played with skill and pathos by Michael Grady-Hall). The classic scene in which Malvolio attempts to woo Olivia in a most misguided fashion came off well on first night, but was one of few moments of real belly-laughter. Samuel West plays Malvolio as a tedious man of heartbreaking decency.

There is joy near the end, but melancholy is never far away. This is the prevailing quality in Matt Maltese’s music, which ends the evening with that feeling, one that is not stereotypically festive but is as Christmassy as turkey and tinsel.

Those who want a light evening of jingly cheer should probably give this a miss. But for those keener to embrace the weirder and darker side of the season, it is worth unwrapping.

Until January 18. Call 01789 331111 or visit rsc.org.uk to book