Twelfth Night (Vol. 26) | Hugh Leonard (review date August 1966)

Hugh Leonard (review date August 1966)

SOURCE: "All Styles Go," in Plays and Players, Vol. 13, No. 11, August, 1966, pp. 16-17.

An heroic Sir Toby, a grimly disenchanted Feste, a Snudge-like Malvolio, and a Viola who strides boyfully around Illyria with the bemusement of a twentieth-century Alice in a medieval rabbit warren: these are the ingredients of Clifford Williams' new production of Twelfth Night at Stratford-upon-Avon. Shakespeare's alternative title for Twelfth Night was What You Will: which Mr Williams has evidently taken as a message personally intended for himself. It is not that he mixes his styles—at least not any more than Shakespeare did in inventing a fairyland with back-streets: what he has done is not to elect for any style in particular … certainly insofar as ensemble acting is concerned. An ill-assorted bunch of fools, decadents, swingers, melancholies, time-servers and transvestites is dropped into the...

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