Edward Dick's intensely enjoyable production is acted on the same circular stage and against the same crumbling brick walls as the Romeo and Juliet that opened this year's season at Regent's Park earlier in the week. Maybe it will still be there when A Midsummer Night's Dream arrives next month, since its suggestion that relations between the sexes need - and in one case fail to receive - repair is common to all three.

This Twelfth Night opens with Oscar Pearce's Orsino not simply lovesick but hysterical at his constant rejection by the grieving Olivia. He sags across the stage, drooping on the shoulders of his courtiers - and, though in the course of the play this behaviour makes one suspect the future success of a marriage he might make to anyone (even Natalie Dew's sturdy Viola), when at last happiness looks imminent it is reassuring to see some wit and merriment emerge.

Dick often makes characters from one scene flow across the background of another. It's to no great purpose unless, perhaps, to suggest the swift movement of events - except when, at the start of the play, Olivia and her household, deeply veiled, move gloomily past Orsino to provide visible evidence to account for his sickness.

Much use is also made of Dominic Muldowney's music, drifting in when love is discussed or demonstrated. The exquisite songs he has written for Clive Rowe's Feste - Come Away, Death and The Wind and the Rain - and most delicately sung by him, are both wistful and offer the suggestion that this wistfulness goes a wee bit far, don't you think.

Janie Dee offers a more mature Olivia than is usual, casting an interesting gloss on her infatuation with an evidently adolescent Viola, especially as Dew is uncommonly convincing as a boy, even cheekily smoking a cigarette while courting, which possibly goes too far. Dee's charming, intelligent, swiftly self-aware Olivia, astonished by the sweet charm of Viola/Cesario's wooing, stirs reminders of a very different method of courtship - Petruchio's of Kate - but in that case also the woman is won over by amazement. No one has ever spoken to Olivia like this before. One can only hope that the Sebastian she ultimately marries can learn from his wiser sister.

Richard O'Callaghan's Malvolio, as dapper as Poirot, has to be humiliated since this is vital to the plot, but the punishment that Shakespeare doles out for his peevishness and ambition seems intolerable today - and this production cuts it to the bone. On a warmish summer evening it comes as an amazing pleasure to see such a well-thought-out and convincing production as this.

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