Twelfth Night

Playwright: William Shakespeare Director: Emma Rice Shakespeare’s Globe, 21 New Globe Walk, Bankside, London SE1 (020-7401 9919) Until 5 August Running time: 2hrs 45mins (including interval)

“Emma Rice was never going to go quietly,” said Fiona Mountford in the London Evening Standard. After just two seasons, the innovative artistic director has been asked to leave the Globe by the theatre’s board, who were unimpressed by her “distinctly nontraditional practices”: an excess of flashy lighting, ramped-up sound effects, disco music, and so on. For her swansong show in the Globe’s main outdoor space, she has given us a Twelfth Night that’s “exuberant, anarchic, accessible and quite, quite maddening”. It’s Twelfth Night as knockabout musical, with Feste, Olivia’s licensed fool, as master of ceremonies. Yet as played by drag artiste Le Gateau Chocolat, this Feste “fails to capture any of the character’s unique melancholy and wisdom”. What Rice gives us is the “theatrical equivalent of a scorched-earth policy”, lacking the depth and “rich ambiguity” the play requires. Even so, a “mischievous part of me” hopes it breaks all box office records.

Ironically, Rice’s final show achieves what many critics of the new regime have found wanting, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph: a “joyous complicity between player and space, and a warm audience rapport, too”. If it doesn’t fully honour Shakespeare (his words have been much mucked about with), it does make the most of the Globe. I for one loved it, said Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail. There are Irish jigs, a dance routine to Sister Sledge’s We Are Family, and any number of splendidly over-the-top turns, such as a “superb” Malvolio from Katy Owen, strutting about in a dodgy wig. Hurrah for Rice! Down with the “timid bores” on the Globe board!

To my mind, the production makes it all too clear why Rice is going, said Michael Billington in The Guardian. It has “brio” in spades, but “never gets to grips with text and character”. One of Rice’s impish touches, said Matt Trueman on Whatson Stage. com, has been to include numerous nods to the Globe’s own domestic drama. In fact, the play closes on a choreographed set piece featuring the waving of white flags: a “semaphore dance routine that signals a surrender”.