★★★★☆ A deliciously staged comedy filled with laughter yet laced with melancholy.

Belvoir St Theatre Upstairs
July 27, 2016

Twelfth Night is considered by many to be one of Shakespeare’s most perfect comedies but it is also one of his darkest, shot through as it is with melancholy, the ache of unrequited love, cruelty and suggestions of madness.

Productions can go any which way, as directors decide where the balance lies between laughter and tears, and just how much to explore the darker elements simmering beneath the surface. When Antony Sher played Malvolio in Bill Alexander’s 1987 Royal Shakespeare Company production, for example, he was left defeated, bedraggled and deranged at the end, driven truly mad by his incarceration: the joke had gone too far.

Directing the play for Belvoir, Eamon Flack doesn’t push the darker elements. Instead he helms a production where delightful comedy is to the fore, though laced with a gentle, touching melancholy.

Believed to have been written around 1601 as an entertainment for the end of the Christmas season, Twelfth Night, or What You Will (to give it its full title), revolves around love, sexual ambiguity and mistaken identity. Set in Illyria where dream seems to merge with...