Lovers in the Levant

Twelfth Night
Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

It’s a welcome refreshment after the RSC’s recent dramatisations of hard drinking and mass starvation in Russia to be landed on the sun-soaked coast of Mediterranean Illyria, and especially so in the company of a new and exquisitely beguiling Viola. Director Gregory Doran has been to much scholarly trouble in updating Shakespeare’s pirate-infested Illyria to Byron’s Albania. There, when visiting the court of a notorious warlord, Byron rhapsodised ‘The Turk, the Greek, the Albanian and the Moor/ Here mingled in their many-hued array’. Doubtless there were atrocities enough around the corner, but Doran has always been strong on devising exotic Mediterranean settings for Shakespeare’s comedies. He and designers Robert Jones (set) and Tim Mitchell (lighting) have done nothing better in this direction. They give us the Middle East of the Grand Tour in Napoleonic times, one in which the British gentry have made themselves so far at home as to have become quite the local lord and milady.