Twelfth Night @ Bodleian Library

The Met Office shipping forecast echoed around the windy walls of the Bodleian Library’s Old School’s Quadrangle on Tuesday night, setting the scene for the shipwreck that separates twins Sebastian and Viola at the start of Twelfth Night.

Was I alone in shrugging off fears about Fastnet, Faeroes and Forties? Of greater moment to the audience, seated coverless under menacing clouds, was what Mother Nature planned to hurl at us.

As it turned out, only one brief downpour, after which the skies cleared and the temperature fell — dramatically.

Anyone planning to catch this entertaining, if sometimes perverse, OUDS production is advised to wrap up well.

Another tip: sit centrally, in the front row, ideally. Director Max Gill ranges his actors across the quad’s width. Audibility is a big problem. Competing with the action, besides wailing sirens and clanging bells beyond the walls, are the singers of the company, just back from delivering the production on the Thelma Holt tour to Japan. One tender scene between Rebecca Banatvala’s Viola — in her guise as the boy Cesario — and her boss Orsino (Frederick Bowerman, above) was completely drowned by a Puccini aria being sung at my end of things.

That this Viola is a fairly good double for Sebastian (Jonathan Purkiss) helps in the mix-ups that follow his arrival in Illyria. These are unlikely in the extreme, incidentally, once Viola has admitted the possibility of her twin being alive, when Sebastian’s friend Antonio (Joseph Allan, doubling as Feste) mistakes her for him. Any production that doesn’t jack her lines “tempests are kind, etc” fails the credibility test.

Illyria is an odd place in Mr Gill’s conception, where the usually demure Olivia (Flora Zackon) sounds like the haughty Queen of Hearts and dresses like Miss Havisham in her ragged wedding dress.

The men meanwhile (and this includes Cesario) are in jodhpurs or, in some cases, long-johns. This curious costume conceit, for which Mr Gill takes credit, sets the mind off into odd channels — Monty’s Python’s Trim Jeans Theatre, for instance, or Robin Hood Men in Tights — and is singularly inappropriate where the starchy steward Malvolio is concerned.

Jordan Waller always sounds right, though, with his Scots ‘man o’ the manse’ accent, and he delivers the goods sartorially later with his hideous yellow cross-gartered stockings.

This famous scene is well managed, as is his earlier gulling over ‘Olivia’s’ letter by the outraged Sir Toby Belch (Andrew Laithwaite), the foppish Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Peter Huhne) and a raunchily alluring Maria (Georgina Hellier).

Twelfth Night
Bodleian Library
Until today
Tickets: 01865 305305 oxfordplayhouse.com
Southwark Playhouse, Aug 20-23
Tickets: 020 7407 0234 southwarkplayhouse.co.uk