Sir Laurence Olivier's interpretative resource is such that there was no guessing beforehand how he would choose to treat Malvolio; and the choice actually made—whether or not given theatrical validity—certainly took the Stratford first-night audience by surprise. It did not fall on the Puritan, whose portentous gravity is in itself a standing provocation to the fool-baiting Illyrians, a stiff spruce figure of preposterous pretensions. Nor on the insolent jackin-office, over-ambitious and overweening, properly put to his purgation. And not on the fantastic complex creature, twitching with distempered self-esteem and tortured by ambition, who gradually steals our sympathies from the over-zealous tricksters. The actor turned from these familiar personages to present a plain unlikeable man.

Sir Laurence's Malvolio is a shaven and cropped Round-head among laughing Cavaliers whose breeding he envies and whose frivolous manners he despises. He is an efficient steward who in the discharge of his duties may show ill-nature towards his fellow servants, but he is never preposterous. Those about him may dislike his starchiness; there is no particular reason why they (or we) should laugh at him. He hardly seems a natural butt. Even his manner of interrupting the midnight revels is more that of a man reasonably annoyed at being wakened from sleep than of an officers' steward. It requires the introduction of a red hot poker—manipulated with much realistic delicacy—to make the interrupter stir his comic stumps. While Malvolio's day-dreams swell towards realization the actor suggests the depths of social misgiving from which they rise at the artful Maria's enticement. He winds up the scene with an inimitable piece of by-play in which the grave steward after several wry attempts to smile into a mirror achieves a satisfied asinine grin. We have leave to laugh at him once more as "the yellow-legged stork," but it is not laughter but pathos that Sir Laurence is primarily concerned to produce—the pathos of a plain unlikeable man misplaced in a land of misrule and cruelly abused. Unfortunately the prison scene, with Malvolio lifting a stubbornly sensible head, crowned with a single straw, above floor level, miscarries. We have missed much of the laughter that springs from more conventional readings; we should miss the pathos also were Sir Laurence not able to cry "I'll be avenged on the whole pack of you" in a way that hushes the whole theatre. This cry, so exquisitely studied and so poignantly accusing, is one of the things—alas, not many—that we shall remember of a performance in which a well considered intention somehow fails of its full theatrical effect.

The scenery and the costumes of Mr. Malcolm Pride are always lovely to look at, and so is the Viola of Miss Vivien Leigh. She is like some happy hunting boy on her ways between Orsino and Olivia, but in speaking her contemptuous or tender rebukes of the lovers' poses she gets little variety into the verse. She is in her romantic way a little too "knowing" to convey the natural and transparent honesty which is designed for those who are the dupes of their own sentimentalism. Sir John Gielgud's production has to keep a difficult balance between his realistic Malvolio and the play's comic and romantic elements. He is inclined to hurry the roystering Illyrians. This is a pity since Mr. Alan Webb and Mr. Michael Denison are both wonderfully well suited as the two knights. Miss Angela Baddeley puts a somewhat shrewish edge on Maria's tongue. Delicate, imaginative grouping adds to the loveliness of the setting and costumes, and the romantics are well served by Miss Maxine Audley's gracious and elegant Olivia and by Mr. Keith Micheli as an Orsino who fairly revels in the pomp and circumstance of courtship. It must be said, however, that the loveliness of colour and the lightness of movement cannot altogether conceal the absence of feeling and humour that are of the essence of Twelfth Night.