What country, friends, is this? Good question. Gregory Doran’s production is set somewhere on the western tip of Turkey, Smyrna perhaps, where Greeks and Turks lived fairly peacefully together once upon a time; Paul Englishby’s music and Robert Jones’s design suggest a colourful mixed culture. Enter Duke Orsino (Jo Stone-Fewings), full of music and full of himself: a man of passionate immaturity who revels in being a rejected lover, a loveable exhibitionist playing his tragical-comical-pastoral role for himself. Whoever marries him will have her job cut out. Viola will handle it: this is one of Shakespeare's plays that makes you want to know the afterlives of the characters. Nancy Carroll plays her, thoughtfully and beautifully, as dreamy but strong, desperate but resilient, generous but equipped with a biting humour. Does she go to Orsino's court to capture him? Maybe, maybe not. Carroll herself might know, but she gives nothing away. I think she recognises the importance of that beguiling Shakespearian ambiguity that makes his plays so gripping and morally alert.

This is a sad comedy. A cloud of benevolent melancholy hangs over this Illyria. Everybody loves or is loved by the wrong people, which is like falling into two mousetraps at the same time. This is what is missing from this production: it bubbles with comedy, but lacks the kindly, ironical melancholy that can make you want to say to the characters, come on now, pull yourselves together. I liked Richard McCabe’s boisterous Sir Toby, but where is the boisterous knight’s guilty realisation that he has gone too far? Feste, too, is a crucial role: a sad, solitary wit who has sized up everybody else and lets them know it. He's the entertainer with a secret smile; but Miltos Yerolemou’s rowdy, acrobatic performance robs the role of its heart and mind. On the other hand, there’s Richard Wilson’s majestic Malvolio, like a long-retired sergeant major still dreaming of promotion, and self-admiring to the point of idol worship. This is a masterclass performance, irresistible and manifold like its author.

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