Twelfth Night

The RSC’s latest stab at Twelfth Night is a curious thing. Bring the Bard’s more popular works back to the stage are a challenge for any company but especially for this one. Directors seem to be under strict order not to subtract too much or update the references, which is understandable: it doesn’t want to be forever known as the Royal Shakespeare(ish) Company.

Instead, Prasanna Puwanarajah has put his past experience as a doctor specialising in reconstructive surgery to good use by giving a new appearance to one of the canon’s more staid comedies.
Usually, Twelfth Night can feel like a long Sunday afternoon in the back seat of your parents’ car. But here, Puwanarajah has wisely handed the car keys over to Feste (Michael Grady-Hall) as well as Sir Toby Belch (Joplin Sibtain) and his gang of fools. By pushing these two to the front and adding in dollops of clowning and music, the production manages to let some much-needed light into the proceedings.

In most stagings, the comedy is treated like a garnish; here, it’s the main course. It rescues the play from its own occasional tendency to be a bit of a slog. It turns out that when you stop treating the script like a holy relic and start treating it like a stag do that’s gone slightly off the rails, everyone has a much better time.

Then there is Samuel West as Malvolio. Traditionally, the manservant is played as a cross between a school hall monitor and a man who finds joy only in tax audits. West, however, gives us a Malvolio who is actually having a bit of fun.
He seems quite happy to go along with the japes, and by the end, he’s managed the impossible: he’s actually won us over. It’s a bold choice to make the man in the yellow stockings the most relatable person on stage, but in an age where everyone is trying to sell you a lifestyle they can't afford, West’s social-climbing steward feels like a man of our times.

However, we must address the elephant in the room. Or rather, the two people standing in the middle of a very large room.The dialogues are, frankly, the weakest link. The Barbican is one of London’s grandest stages, a brutalist expanse that requires a certain amount of theatrical "oomph" to fill. When it’s just two actors up there, the energy tends to leak out of the sides.

You can have all the RADA training in the world, and you can articulate your vowels until the cows come home, but if you’re standing in a vast void trying to make a conversation about a ring seem interesting, you’re fighting a losing battle. Shakespeare wrote for a crowded, smelly globe; the Barbican is a cavernous cathedral. Without the buffer of the physical comedy, the words often feel a bit thin, rattling around the rafters like a loose shutter in a gale.

It is a noble effort. By leaning into the chaos of Sir Toby and the charm of Samuel West, there’s plenty to keep us awake between the more prosaic back-and-forths. It’s a comedy that remembers it is supposed to be a comedy, even if the intimate moments feel like they’ve been lost in the post.
Twelfth Night continues until 17 Jan 2026.


Photo credit: Helen Murray