If you seek the "fashionable Elizabethan melancholy" that has dominated so many productions of "Twelfth Night", you should "pack up your lyre and go elsewhere", said Rachel Halliburton in The Times. Robin Belfield's "carnivalesque" new staging of Shakespeare's "tale of mistaken identities and thwarted desires" at the Globe is a "riotous celebration of life".
Belfield emphasises the farcical elements and the themes of gender and sexual fluidity, said Dzifa Benson in The Daily Telegraph – while Jean Chan's design adds to the mood of "licensed disorder", with a gleeful mishmash of eras and styles. With strong acting and a vibrant comic energy, it makes for a late-summer "jamboree" that's "joyfully tongue-in-cheek".
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Certainly, this staging is "extremely knockabout, steering away from the play's anguished layers", said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. The pangs of unrequited desire – the very heart of "Twelfth Night" – are never quite felt, and the angst of the central romances is "swallowed up by laughter and lightness". In some cases, too, the verse is "dampened by unremarkable delivery". For all that, though, this production has "oodles of charm and midsummer madness". "Make of it what you will, I suppose."
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