So, Twelfth Night (RSC Stratford) is, in fact a revenge play, in which the Clown's resentment of Malvolio provides the pivotal theme. Sir Toby Belch is the kind of bluff fellow whose bluffness is a cover for considerable nastiness. When things get out of hand, lives are not merely threatened—they are in real danger. Both the weather and the time of day are hable to change abruptly, just as love may turn to hate or the dead be restored to life, to the terror of their loved ones.

It is a reading which makes a virtue of what is often taken to be merely a worrying appendix to the piece—the unresolved resentment of Malvolio. When Emrys James delivers his last line, "I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you", from the wings, he rather makes one believe that in any sequel to the piece the revenge would be as out of proportion to the insult as the Clown's retaliation has been.

The Clown (Richard O'Callaghan) is only once given his name, Feste, and it is worth, considering him as a type rather than an individual in order to test the production's hypothesis. Most clowns get insulted pretty liberally in Shakespeare, and most seem to bear their insults pretty well. This one, exceptionally, takes grave exception. Malvolio in the First Act calls him a rascal, and points out to Olivia that unless she encourages him he tends to run out of gags.

Perhaps it is the professional nature of the insult which rankles. At any rate, Mr O'Callaghan conceals his hurt behind a dry manner and a gentle, unforced delivery of his lines. He bides his time, and while he does so his behaviour must be for the audience something of an enigma. The enigma is solved as soon as the Clown has Malvolio at his mercy. Then his behaviour becomes quite vigorously horrible. Playing the exorcist with a hand-bell, he goes to extreme lengths to convince Malvolio that he is possessed of the devil. Mr James has previously held the stage as a man of absurd pretentions. He emerges from the confines of his prison in a state of extreme shock. The society which the play's director, John Caird, has depicted, is one which will not scruple to kick a man when he is down.

The Clown tells Malvolio why he has had his revenge, and in the last song (the music is largely new, set by Ilona Sekacz) tells us why he is vengeful. When he was a child, he was greeted with indulgence. But when he grew up, he found that, being a knave and a thief, he was an outcast. At the time of his marriage, he learnt that he could not make his living as a bully. So he took to drink.

This is, or appears to be, what the song says. The wind and the rain of the refrain are an invitation to the sound effects which Mr Caird so generously employs. The whole tendency of the production is towards a consistent increase in dramatic tension.

Obviously the trick could not be pulled off merely on the basis of a strong reading of Malvolio and the Clown. After all, the centre of the comedy is Viola, and the main matter of the piece is the tale of mistaken sexual identity. The story is a romance in which the sea miraculously yields up its dead alive, and in which love is a magic element. But there is nothing mere about this magic. Viola learns in the course of the play what both sides of unrequited love are like.

The programme, which offers none of the usual critical gobbets, is strewn with Shakespearean sonnets—a gentle way of reminding the audience that the telling of such a romance is a way, for Shakespeare, of talking about love as experienced in his world, and indeed in ours. The richness of Viola's experience, the ambiguity of Orsino's feeling towards her, the pain she must undergo in her dealings with the doting Olivia—everything requires a most truthful kind of acting. The romance is really a mechanism to bring you up against the harsh truth.

For me, the decisive moment in Zoë Wanamaker's performance as Viola came when, reunited with Sebastian, she showed her deep fear that her drowned brother had returned as a ghost to frighten her. She had suffered enough already, and now, on top of everything, the spirit world was playing an unforgivable trick, trifling inexcusably with her deepest feelings of loss and grief.

Miss Wanamaker is a richly gifted comic actress, with a pert and eloquent nose and the ability to raise a laugh through the most modest twitch of her body or inflection of her voice. Secure in this ability, she concentrates upon the sad truth of Viola's experience. She truly makes us feel.

Orsino is played by Miles Anderson, with ease, authority and a beautiful voice. The household of Olivia (Sarah Berger) consists of John Thaw as the strikingly nasty Sir Toby Belch, Daniel Massey, cleverly cast against expectations as the loopy, passive and very funny Aguecheek, and Gemma Jones, who strains perhaps a little to contain her great gifts within the role of Maria.

Robin Don's set, evidence of the way in which Stratford designers are now diverging stylistically, provides a rocky hillside and the largest box tree I have ever seen (an Illyrian species, of course). The fights by Malcolm Ranson look, as usual, very dangerous.