RSC’s Twelfth Night is a five-star Christmas cracker of a show

FIVE STARS *****: Twelfth Night, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, until 18th January

Are you by any chance familiar with Festivus? It’s the secular, non-commercial alternative to Christmas created by author Daniel O’Keefe and made infamous in a 1997 episode of Seinfeld when George ‘Can’t Stand Ya’ Costanza’s father Frank explains that he actually invented it after he found himself fighting a rival dad who had grabbed the last toy doll in the store that they both wanted to gift to their kids.

Looking to change his ways, Frank thought-up Festivus where – and I quote – “you gather your family around and tell them all the ways they have disappointed you over the past year.”

Sounds just what the doctor ordered, right? But nowhere near the tonic that FESTEvus is, the brand new holiday celebration served up by director Prasanna Puwanarajah via this marvelous new production of Twelfth Night.

We’re calling it FESTEvus because Michael Grady-Hall’s Feste the fool is who everyone will be talking about once they’ve experienced the show. A tour-de-force in dramatic enrichment, he is the surreal master of ceremonies, setting the pace, fettling the tone, building a bridge of bonhomie between the play and the audience. Whether he’s juggling, messing about with clown noses, painting the set, collapsed in a drunken stupor, fiddling with a banana or serenading us with a melancholy air, Grady-Hill’s Feste has been empowered to be our guide expertly helping us negotiate our way through the play’s fluctuating emotional swell. As if by magic he controls the mood, whether in command of the lighting by yanking a giant pull chain hung from the ceiling, or masterminding the scenery by drawing back and forth a gigantic church organ via showy bouts of telekinesis, or working the music like a DJ, coaxing and cajoling the chap in the jumper at the keyboard to strike up a jaunt or lay down something sombre.

We may name this Feste-ivity after the Fool but don’t for one moment think that he’s our sole delight because this is as near as the RSC has come to completely sympatico casting in a long, long while. Even If Grady-Hill wasn’t so splendidly orchestrating the show to his minstrel dance, this excursion into love and mourning would still be brilliant.

Gwyneth Keyworth is a revelation as Cesario, the unrevealed Viola, sometimes bold, often timorous and mostly baffled. She inhabits a plot designed to serve opportunities for crowd-pleasing cross-dressing panto innuendo and discovers, then delivers, a part tingling with such emotional upheaval that we sigh her every sigh along with her.

Bally Gill is fast becoming an RSC favourite and his Orsino is a lovably narcissistic dufus, while Freema Agyeman is an utter wow as Olivia, gorgeous when grieving in designer black, fiery when frustrated, red hot when randy, a diva of lovelorn determination..

The last time I can recall seeing a Malvolio at the RSC was Adrian Edmondson back in 2017 and boy, was he funny. So good, in fact, that apart from his show-stealing shenanigans including a joyously gross cross-gartered jig for an encore, I can’t remember much more about it except John Hodgkinson as an exceptionally Falstaffian Sir Toby Belch.

Samuel West’s Malvolio is cut from a different cloth entirely. Brooding, vain, with an insufferably sanctimonious manner, he’s the whipper-off of Santa hats and the stuffed shirt set on spoiling the party.

The pompous, self-deluded dignity with which he carries himself ekes out a little tragedy as he’s not the idiot he’s often made out to be, but he is a stickler so when he’s gulled by the fake letter into the ridiculous belief that Olivia lusts after him, his transformation into a would-be lothario, descending a stripper’s pole in his marigold socks and crisp white undies, is all the more hilarious and not a little hideous.

Bound and blindfolded, unknowingly honey-trapped, declared insane, he is as much to be pitied as blamed and by the end, his vow of revenge is almost whispered through clenched teeth rather than bellowed, those complicit in his downfall more cowed and regretful than in most productions.

Joplin Sibtain’s Sir Toby is a virile roaring boy of the Peter O’Toole/ Richard Harris mode, volatile, sweaty, sweary and unpredictably schizophrenic the way dangerous drunks are. There’s one in every pub in the land. Or there used to be when there used to be pubs, and not alehouses that prostitute themselves as restaurants in a desperate bid for profit.

Anyway, remember the Simpsons’ Seven Duffs in the Duff Beer Gardens Theme Park - Tipsy, Queasy, Surly, Sleazy, Edgy, Dizzy and Remorseful? This Belch is, by turns, all of them - self-important, self-pitying and self-loathing. It’s an uncomfortable, grandstand performance which, one hopes, Sibtain isn’t method-acting or there’s not a chance in hell he’ll make it into 2025.

Demetri Goritsas plays his lily-livered sidekick Sir Andrew Aguecheek with an American accent and a pleasing confusion, like he’s been wardrobed for Death Of A Salesman and somehow wound up at Cheltenham Races. Mousey monstrous in his timidity he’s easily led and his financial victimisation at the hands of Belch would be unbearably cruel were it not for his endless groundless boasting. He, like Malvolio, gets what’s coming to him but that’s not to say we don’t feel a little sorry for him.

Isn’t there anything not to like? Well, considering the little contemporary nods snuck in here and there, like the priest’s “I heart Jesus” mug and Belch enlivening the sozzled organist with a line of coke (“Sherbert for Herbert” – sure the Bard didn’t write that!), leaving in Orsino’s lines about Viola being henceforth “Your master’s mistress” felt a bit old school and sexist off.

But that’s about it. Puwanarajah’s Twelfth Night is that rarest of theatrical achievements – a spectacle wherein the play, the production, the casting, the performances, the staging, the lighting, the costuming and the music are all in perfect harmony.

It’s so good it almost extinguishes lingering memories of the recent Othello debacle and that’s no mean feat. Twelfth Night is the best bit of Shakespeare the RSC had put on this year or for many a year come to that. C’mon, it’s FESTE-vus! Let’s sing along with Sir Toby: “Maybe this Christmas won’t be quite as bad as last year.”