It is festival time in Illyria, with masked revelries alongside the music and song in Robin Belfield’s staging of Shakespeare’s comedy. A period-dress production with passing modern-day asides, it is extremely knockabout, steering away from the play’s anguished layers. That might be enough for a summer show, but it has little to add to Sean Holmes’s roisterous, post-pandemic romp of a Twelfth Night in 2021.
The dyspeptic crew comprising Sir Andrew Aguecheek (played by Ian Drysdale as a flouncy Oscar Wilde type), a Lady Belch (Jocelyn Jee Esien) and Maria (Alison Halstead) works well. But the angst around the central romances is swallowed up by laughter and lightness.
