Even though it had little serious competition, this production by Peter Gill struck me as far and away the RSC's best offering at Stratford last year. And, re-staged for London by Colin Cook, the play still comes across with its original vigour and vitality. Quite simply, Mr. Gill has gone straight to the heart of a magical and mysterious IIlyria, revealing the lovers to be a responsive and complex quartet, continually fascinated and drawn on by the miracle of identify. No romantic twadle, no coy aside here; when Cesario tumbles to the possibility of her white, androgynous exterior having charmed the Countess, the implications are both humorous and disturbing. Words do indeed prove rascals, but outward appearances are doubly dangerous—and, therefore, doubly exciting.

Similarly, I have never before experienced the Olivia/Cesario and the Orsino/Cesario scenes so sharply. They positively crackle. The cue is taken from the dominating painted Narcissus on the upstage wall; Orsino not only concentrates passionately on the reflectively "male" apparition that is the disguised Viola, he all but disappears under her skin. John Price as the Duke, volatile and powerful, is unstintingly sworn to his latest passion. His other languid courtiers are ignored and finally dismissed as he breaks down at Cesario's tale of distanced grief. Melancholy is usually the province of Feste. But there is no more crucially poignant moment in this production than when Jane Lapotaire, knocked sideways by Orsino's energetic surrender to her, moves away and chokingly admits that she is "all the daughters of her father's house; and all the brothers too."

The passions and outbursts are deeply felt in the speaking of the lines. I cannot remember a production of a Shakespearean comedy where so much actual sense was made of the verse. On another level. Paul Moriarty makes an impressive Antonio, devotedly trailing an ebullient Sebastian (Robert Lloyd) with offers of servitude and expressions of loyalty that are oddly out of tune with the harmonies of the air. Antonio sees things as they are, deals in the everyday realities of a relationship, while the lovers discover perhaps more heady and ambiguous truths by dalliance and impulse. Antonio is as much an outsider in his way as Feste and Malvolio are in theirs (a point brilliantly elaborated by Lesile Fiedler in The Stranger in Shakespeare), and this is here stunningly, emphasised at the play's conclusion. The lovers swirl and exit, perhaps still wrongly paired, it matters not; but they leave Antonio stranded in front of the painted Narcissus, a baffled figure, while Feste spits out his final song.

The casting of Ron Pember as Feste is inspired. He goes through the motions reluctantly not only when pressed into Orsino's service; but whenever called upon. "Youth's a stuff will not endure" is sung, at first for Belch and Ague-cheek but, eventually, as an expression of disgust, a hopeless, shrugged epitaph for his own pointless function. He is a Cockney sloucher, hating his repertoire as much as others seem to like it, openly scavenging for coppers with a routine flippancy that barely veils a total contempt. Mr. Pember sings wonderfully, and he even manages to explain why he does not join in the gulling of Malvolio—he has fallen sound asleep on the floor as Maria (Patricia Hayes, neat and bouncy) unleashes her plan on the befuddled aristocrats.

Nicol Williamson's Malvolio remains a superbly rounded piece of acting. Squeezing his Welsh puritanical whine through thin, bloodless lips, he walks painfully on lifted shoes even before the cross-gartering. Still yellow-stockinged, he emerges from dungeon to sunlight with hair standing on end, eyes shielded from the general gaze. It is a grand and intelligent performance that restates the play's general themes of vanity and over-reaching desire in vivid style. The resolution is marvellously handled, a comic climax magnificently achieved as Mary Rutherford's Olivia confronts, with indecorous hunger, the brief prospect of a married life with two beautiful men. The design by William Dudley and the costumes by Deirdre Clancy are coloured in ravishing gradation of yellows. browns and oranges. The music by George Fenton is, appropriately, exquisite.