I sometimes wonder what would happen if our bright young directors took the same impertinent liberties with the work of other dramatists which they now invariably take with Shakespeare. Early Noàl Coward could be played as Restoration comedy. Ibsen could be played as Aldwych farce on a permanent set with nine doors. Accept the principle that the less the audience understand of the dialogue the more they will enjoy the horseplay, and any play can be treated as an abandoned old clothes shop only fit to be burgled by the next band of strolling players.

There is no doubt that much of our drama would be vastly improved by being set aside as a training area for the young commandos of the theatre. But what are they training for? To alter the period of the action, to rejig the entrances and exits of the characters, to distribute among the cast an ingenious assortment of grotesque mannerisms, is really a kind of forgery. If a producer is so confident in his ability as a renovator, he should have the courage to start with the text and rewrite the whole play as Dryden did with Antony and Cleopatra.

At Stratford, Mr. Peter Hall has set out to revarnish and retouch the surface of an old peeling canvas known as Twelfth Night. He has pushed it forward into the Caroline age—but it is the Caroline age seen through the eyes of a Victorian anecdotal painter so that among all the pageboy bobs, coaching-inn furniture and greetings-card flower gardens the unspoken question always seems to be 'When Did You Last See Your Father?' Olivia and Orsino should be a parody pair of aristocratic Arcadian lovers out of Sir Philip Sidney who drop their masks and fumble their lines when their conventional charade gets mixed up with real passion. Both their gentility and their genteelity are clearly signposted in the lines they are given. But under Mr. Hall's guidance Geraldine McEwan plays Olivia like some pert, perky middle-class flapper out of The Boy Friend. Michael Meachum's Orsino is nearer the target—but he is still a romantic Edwardian schoolboy Duke who has not yet quite made the transference from girlish boys to boyish girls.

The subplot of Malvolio, Aguecheek, Sir Toby and Maria was intended as a bass counterpoint theme to the tremulo treble passions of Orsino and Olivia. It is Shakespeare's method of giving depth of focus and an extra dimension to the nonrealistic, almost operatic, lay figures of a dramatic poem. Here again Mr. Hall has obtained brilliant performances from his cast and each individual character is theatrically a striking creation. Mark Dignam's vowel-gargling, proud-nosed Malvolio is a degraded pro-consul exiled among the white trash, Lord Curzon gulled by the beachcombers. Richard Johnson's stricken mental defective, with his heron legs akimbo and sheep face aghast, gives Aguecheek an insane pathos which the part can hardly bear. Such ingenious interpretations can hardly exist side by side. Once more Mr. Hall's determination to avoid dullness succeeds in atomising Shakespeare's play.

Mr. Hall is wrong and I am right. And yet how I enjoyed every moment of his wrongness. Scene after scene explodes like a Roman candle—the patterns are arbitrary, unconnected, perverse and dazzling. And throughout it all, defying Shakespeare with every gesture, struts the funny, touching, huggable, nervous Viola, triumphantly incarnated in Dorothy Tutin.