Before the house lights went down, two men climbed on to the stage and began to sing. Their voices wavered, harmony faltered; they exited auditorium-wards. An usher took their place to explain that this was not part of the performance but an unwelcome protest against BP's sponsorship of the RSC. Embarrassing as it was, the intervention held a certain charm. For all their nervous off-keyness, the singers' performance was touchingly innocent, and the usher's speech was engagingly forthright – all fitting qualities for Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.
These are not the qualities that director David Farr focuses on. His rumbustious production is set in a sort of heyday Humphrey Bogart-style hotel that looks as if it's been hit by a typhoon. A tank of water shimmers under a wooden floor that rises up towards the back of the flies like a wave; a bed and a bath jut out, as if carried towards a crest that is waiting to crash. Jon Bausor's imposing design overwhelms the characters, almost drowns a couple of actors and literally dampens some of the audience.
Laughs are what give this production buoyancy, and the motley crew that make up Olivia's household go overboard to raise them with pantomime-style gusto. The play's romantic triangle – shipwrecked Viola, disguised as a boy, loves Duke Orsino, who loves Lady Olivia, who loves the "boy" – is all but swamped by this overexuberance. Even the lovers bellow their lines at each other as though fighting to be heard above a storm. If broad-brush knockabout rocks your boat, this is fun. If you prefer nuance, the performance to watch is Jonathan Slinger's magnificent Malvolio, plumbing oceanic depths with foam-flecked lightness.
The same Slinger is a magisterial Prospero in The Tempest (another of the plays in this shipwreck trilogy, part of the RSC's World Shakespeare festival; The Comedy of Errors is the third). His Duke is a convincingly spirit-commanding magician, loving father and flawed man struggling for – what? Redemption, perhaps. Certainly, in an extraordinarily moving epilogue, for the audience's complicity in the imaginative act of creation that is a performance.
Farr's direction here – the same team is involved in all three plays – offers strong concepts yet never crushes Shakespeare's fluidities into fixities. The Freudian touch of clothing Prospero and his attendant spirits in identical grey, mud-streaked suits is feather-light. Sandy Grierson, almost dancing Ariel, is more air than flesh, yearning for earthly passions; Amar Hlehel's Caliban is disconcertingly monstrous in his all-too-human viciousness, with heart-wrenching intimations of spirituality.
While the whole company seem to have found their sea legs, special mention should go to Bruce Mackinnon's drunken steward and Felix Hayes's klutzy cook – an impeccably comic double act; also to Emily Taaffe's Miranda and (in particular) Solomon Israel's Ferdinand for so beautifully capturing new love's elusive tenderness. Bausor's stark design gives imaginative space to their play.
