Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek sit collapsed, their eyes rheumy with retrospection, while Feste, as he sings 'What is love?' Tis not hereafter', watches them with tender irony. Later the three of them, spurred on by a Maria of real feeling, are baiting Malvolio when suddenly, as if overcome by shame, they pause to stare at each other aghast. Finally, at the end of his performance as Sir Topas, Feste takes off his beard with a weary disgust, and so permits the audience to be completely charmed by him once more. In other words John Barton, who has achieved at Stratford an intelligent and sensitive account of this notoriously difficult play, has done so by filtering into its darkest corners some of the spirit that moves his fool, a fool so touching in his lapses that we easily forgive him his complicity in the Malvolio plot, and so enchanting in his tone that we forgive him even his appalling jokes. But Mr Barton's production is more than morally good and unusually coherent. It is also robust, funny and warm, full of shrewd observations and genuinely poignant moments. His conception of Feste has led him to a theatrical triumph.

Nevertheless his Feste is not Shakespeare's. The fool of the text is in places wryly wise and always consciously a dependent, a hack with a spiritual life; and his songs, of course, are beautiful. He is also malicious, with the malice of a man who cannot tolerate others knowing what he knows about himself. This Feste enjoys tormenting Malvolio, whose cold insights ('I marvel your ladyship takes delight in such a tavern rascal … unless you laugh and minister to him, he's gagged') constitute a real threat to his powers of enchantment, and thus to his vanity. Mr Barton's Feste agrees in a tone of self-redeeming compassion to bring 'the light and paper, and ink' for Malvolio's letter, and so helps us to forget that Shakespeare's fool subsequently and callously fails to deliver the letter itself. Mr Barton's Feste touches us into more than tolerance with his gesture of shame, and so helps us to forget that Shakespeare's Feste crows triumphantly over the released and now publicly humiliated Malvolio. It is not that in these places Mr Barton has molested the text—rather that by placing the stress elsewhere, by humanely filling in Shakespeare's brutal blanks, he has created a fool who is incapable of doing and saying what he actually says and does; and the audience, like the production, can then pretend he hasn't.

As it is with Feste, so it is with every character in the production. Judi Dench's Viola, for instance, is far too delightful to take advantage of Olivia or in any other way embarrass the audience. When she comes to woo for Orsino's sake, she chortles out the great love passage in a spirit of exuberant parody; and when Malvolio brings her the ring, she receives it with an innocent astonishment that deftly prepares the way for her tremulous 'Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness'. From then on, and perfectly consistently, she reacts to Olivia's overtures with a cleansingly comic gaucheness. But that initial speech—'Make me a willow cabin'—is not a classic of romantic persuasiveness for nothing. If it is ironic in its exaggerations, it is also insidiously enticing in its rhythms—rhythms that Miss Dench's rendering inevitably coarsens. And though Shakespeare's Viola may act out a sly astonishment when she is left alone to contemplate Olivia's confusion, she has already been too revealingly quick-witted with Malvolio—'She took the ring of me, I'll none of it'—and given something about herself away. Shakespeare's Viola, in fact, is a much more knowing girl than Mr Barton's, much more complex, and consequently the comedy in her relationship with Olivia is both more intensely erotic and altogether more dangerous—it's a comedy that cuts cynically through all our illusions about the nature of romantic love to the amoral and chaotic emotions that merely adopt romantic postures as a disguise and for self-disguise. Only Shakespeare's nerve, the elegant confidence with which he defines the limits of his Illyria and the aplomb with which he converts his analysis into seeming playfulness, prevents us from finding the comedy as a whole repellent. We are, in other words, seduced into believing that the instinct for order in comic art will always prevail over the anarchy of our inner lives. And so in a sense it does, on the stage—for there, after all, even poor Antonio, hopelessly in love with another man and with no substitute of the 'correct' sex to be flourished out of the cast list or the wrong clothes, can still be made to rejoice in those flip and inconsequential pairings with which the play concludes. But still he lingers in the memory to remind us that Illyria is after all an illusion that has been fashioned out of much potential, and some actual, pain.

Well, it probably seems perverse to blame Mr Barton for not going far enough into the dark when almost every other review has only qualified its praise in wondering whether he hasn't gone too far. And above all it would be ungracious to end without again saluting a production that is informed in its every moment, and by every member of its cast, with intelligence and humanity. If we haven't got a Twelfth Night that has met the play's most distressing challenges head on, then we can at least be grateful that we have been given one that has profited richly from the way in which it has avoided them.