Really good touring Shakespeare is hard to come by, but once again English Touring Theatre deliver the goods in a production that may be set in the late Elizabethan period but which in many ways seems robustly contemporary. Some of this is down to the fine acting, but much is due to the design, from new Linbury award-winning talent Bec Andrews, which is simplicity itself as it combines a heavy tapestry curtain with a massive photograph of the cruel grey sea.
It puts you in mind of the lives snatched by death before the play has opened, but also the bleakness of the emotional landscape of a tale where misplaced love almost blights lives forever but for the last-minute comic workings out of the plot. Shakespeare's highwire act between tragedy and comedy is nowhere more apparent than in Dugald Bruce-Lockhart's Orsino (always a pig of a part to play with any conviction), who here moons after Olivia (Catherine Walker) like a Romeo in love with the idea of love rather than pierced by the real thing.
In Olivia's misdirected passion for the disguised Viola (Georgina Rich, making her professional debut in a sensitive and emotionally nuanced performance) and Malvolio's misplaced dreams of his mistress, you also see quite clearly the madness of love and the trouble it can lead to. Like so much of this director's work, there is an admirable clarity in Unwin's storytelling and much to enjoy - but if it fails to make the grade as a really great Twelfth Night it is because it never fully discloses the melancholy heart of this play.
You never feel that you have suddenly seen the sun come from behind the clouds on an overcast day. Perhaps it is because the comedy is not quite comic enough (I didn't laugh much in the scene where Malvolio discovers the forged letter from Olivia) and because Alan Williams Feste, very much a wise fool, doesn't quite have that emotional catch required to hook the audience's hearts.
Despite those quibbles, this is good work and an agreeable and accessible evening with some minutely observed characterisations even in the smallest roles - I shall not forget Gareth David-Lloyd look of astonishment turning to joy when he is suddenly surprised by love.
· At Theatre Royal, Brighton, from tomorrow, and touring.
