Illyria this time has moved down to the shores of nineteenth century Greece, with cobalt blue skies, white blocks of houses, arched narrow streets, splashing fountains and open-air benches on both sides backstage.

The play opens on a frozen tableau-vivant. Orsino (Donald Sumpter), oldish, bald on top, with a curious, Chinese kind of plait of hair hanging on one side, holds a double lute to speak the first famous lines If music be the food of love.… The men wear hats, baggy breeches, and boots.

Sir Toby Belch (Roger Allam), wears a brown velvet coat, looks both young and very red in the face and he is courting a young, pert, and pretty Maria (Pippa Guard), which is a welcome change from the tradition of the nightgowned spinster. Sir Andrew Aguecheek, a very tall, awkward fellow with long hanging yellow hair (David Bradley) also wears baggy trousers, complemented by green stockings and leather slippers. He and Roger Allam form a wonderful comic pair, catching the audience's attention and raising laughter very early on in the performance.

Viola (Harriet Walter) finds no apparent difficulty in her change into a man and when she reappears as Cesario she wears deep bottle-green trousers and jerkin with her ginger hair now cropped short. Being rather tall, she will manage to carry the illusion of her transformation fairly well throughout. One may add here that the choice of the actor to play her brother Sebastian (Paul Spence) seems to have obeyed the same desire to lend credence to the central notion of the comedy of errors as the resemblance between them is fairly close.

Feste (Bruce Alexander) wears batik style motley, with hanging stripes, and he has rouge on his cheeks and a crew cut. He looks deliberately out of touch with the rest of the cast, but he will slowly, and with great talent, make himself part of the entertainment.

The tolling of the church bell prepares for the slow entrance upon the stage of the Lady Olivia (Deborah Findlay), who is followed by a mourning procession of women in black. They all have black veils on their faces and wear dresses of black and golden brocade.

Malvolio (Antony Sher) has a trimmed, pointed beard, and is dressed in black from toque to gaiters and has the appearance of an orthodox priest. His stiffness is reinforced by a thin straight white collar and the chain of office that hangs around his neck. He shouts a lot and seems to boss everybody around, but executes his mistress's orders with extreme zeal, as when he literally runs after Cesario to give him Olivia's message and ring. When Cesario arrives at Olivia's house, the black mourners that all walk round her convey the impression of an oriental harem.

Toby expectedly belches his way along for most of the play and he is sometimes answered in this by Aguecheek's as it were absent-minded farts, but this is more funny than vulgar and it represents a human and almost inevitable sign of their horrible abuse of food and drink in this period of festivity and excess. To keep up the atmosphere of carousing and merry-making, here more genuine than forced or sad (probably because Toby and Aguecheek look fairly young) Feste sings—with an excellent voice and without musical accompaniment. The three men then fall to their catches until Maria is woken up and joins in a dance that appropriately turns out to be a form of sirtaki, making for a highly entertaining moment in the production.

It is an empty bottle which Feste throws through his open window that rouses here the soundly sleeping Malvolio from his bed rather than the racket of the revellers. When he suddenly emerges on the stage to restore order, he comes with a net holding both his hair and beard into place, so that the contrast between the severity of his speech and his pompous stance on the one hand and bis ridiculous aspect on the other is irresistible. This is the beginning of a series of astonishing transformations. In the letter scene, he becomes almost hysterical and starts jumping around, red in the face as he discovers the contents of Olivia's letter. When Toby and Fabian come on stage, just before the interval, they are split double with a contained laughter that seems so painfully intense that it takes a while before it breaks out into sound.

After a twenty minute interval, Feste arrives and starts beating on his drum in a rather maddening way. This raises our anticipation as the joke on Malvolio is about be taken a step further.

Toby now has a beard and Olivia wears a veil about her headgear. As for Orsino, with his Leeds accent and his bald patch, he seems to overindulge in his melancholy humour. He is probably too much of a foil to the rest of the company so that it is easier to understand why Olivia (who is here more of a coquette than a rich, cold aristocrat) rejects his suit than why Viola-Cesario secretly falls in love with him.

When Malvolio comes to sport his yellow crossed garters under his black coat, which he keeps flashing at Olivia with leering eyes, the comedy of love's misunderstandings reaches a farcical climax. His black toque, when turned inside out, also appears to have been lined with yellow. Then, like some eerie juggler, he pulls out more lining—from his pockets this time—which hangs like long yellow scarves, and follows Olivia around in a frantic and mysterious erotic dance. When his Lady has gone he splashes his face with water at the fountain as the cicadas begin to pulse louder in the heat of the day—a clear enough indication that Malvolio suffers from sun-stroke and midsummer madness.

Then Toby, Fabian, and Maria arrive with crosses and garlic garlands to exorcize him: Greece, as it seems, has how turned into a Transylvanian hotbed of vampires … But next comes a more straightforward medical allusion to madness with the urinal which Maria carries with her and deftly manages to have filled quickly during one of Malvolio's fits.

In the madness scene, Malvolio, pilloried, is brought up from below. He gives the impression of groping around in darkness while his voice is amplified to suggest a hollow cellar. When masquerading as Sir Topaz, Feste goes down a ladder which leans against the window where Sir Toby and Maria are watching the scene while exchanging love kisses. Malvolio is tied to a stake like a bear and he whirls round it like some mad animal. At the end of the scene, he presses Olivia's crumpled letter against his cheek, with a tormented, hallucinated look on his face. This is an extremely powerful scene, which suggests, in a pathetic way, that the borderline between the light abuses of festive misrule and real madness has now become an extremely thin one.

When Malvolio reappears on stage at the end, he is totally bedraggled and, red-eyed, tries to shield his sight from the recovered daylight. But after Feste has once more taunted him with the whirligig of time speech, Malvolio says the expected I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you in a curiously slow way that ends in a singsong. When he goes away, with a strange smile on bis face, one understands that the joke has really been pushed too far and that he has become truly mad. This last, dark note is in keeping with Antony Sher's remarkable interpretation which manages to reveal the dark potentialities of Shakespeare's last comedy.

So, all in all, this is a superb and memorable production which brings out the festive as well as the serious dimension of the play. While Antony Sher as Malvolio gives an astonishing performance that sheds new light on the character, Roger Allam and David Bradley are no less remarkable and funny as Sir Toby and Sir Andrew. Pippa Guard, who was revealed by the parts she played in the BBC Shakespeare series and has now made a very welcome appearance on the Stratford stage, plays a lively, arch, and beguiling Maria. Feste also gives a strong performance and the rather disappointing Donald Sumpter and Deborah Findlay, who seem to have been miscast in the roles of Duke Orsino and Olivia, do not finally detract too much from our pleasure.