Lindsay Posner's Edwardian Twelfth Night has marginally improved on the journey from Stratford to London: much of the decorative clutter, including grandfather clocks and Beardsley prints, has gone and some of the performances have deepened. But it's a production that almost makes you sympathise with Adrian Noble's plans to shake up the Royal Shakespeare Company. You feel it's being staged to fill up the Shakespearean quota, rather than because of any active passion.
If any idea drives Posner's production it is the Platonic one that we are all sexually split souls searching for a primeval hermaphroditic unity. Thus Olivia lovingly kisses the boy-girl Cesario, while Orsino fondles his hair and Sebastian and Antonio are seen emerging from a rumpled bed suggesting unusual permissiveness on the part of Illyrian hoteliers.
But I was reminded of a stunning Jurgen Flimm production I saw in Hamburg that really ran with the Platonic idea instead of simply toying with it.
There, Olivia hitched up her skirts in an attempt to seduce Cesario, while Orsino found in the boy a perfect mirror image of himself. Eros was the guiding spirit of Flimm's production, where it is simply the background to Posner's.
The performance that really justifies the evening is Mark Hadfield's Feste. He has borrowed the flat hat and string tie from Buster Keaton, and the boots from Little Tich. But he reminds me most of Max Wall in his mixture of funny walks and oyster-eyed melancholy.
There's a great moment in the drinking scene when Barry Stanton's Sir Toby and Christopher Good's Sir Andrew are pissing themselves over his allegedly hilarious jokes of the night before, while Hadfield simply gazes out with stone-faced despair.
Hadfield's Feste is a born loner used to corrupting words to grub a living. The only blot on a perfect performance is that composer Gary Yershon lands him with a set of peculiarly jerky, unmemorable songs.
Generally, the comics come off best, but I am still puzzled by Guy Henry's Malvolio. He has added a hint of roughness to his voice since Stratford, but I still feel that he relies too much on his extraordinary physical presence rather than giving us a fully worked-out biography of the character.
And, on the romantic side, while Zoe Waites's Viola has the right, full-throated ardour, Matilda Ziegler's Olivia never quite suggests upper-class poise poleaxed by passion.
Only once, at the climactic reunion of the twins, did the production catch me by the throat. Otherwise it's no more than a decent interim production distinguished by a fine Feste.
· Until March 9. Box office: 020-7638 8891.
