Twelfth Night at Southbank Theatre, The Sumner

This exquisite comedy is a timeless masterpiece, bursting at the seams with passion and music. Yet it starts with a twin sister and brother shipwrecked, grief-stricken, both believing the other to be drowned. Shakespeare’s lyrical fantasy slams poetry into melancholia, laced with drunkenness and misrule in bucket loads. Identity confusion abounds in a whirligig of capricious farce as everything spins out of control towards a sense of harmony.

Simon Phillips (Macbeth) again brings one of Shakespeare’s most celebrated works to life at MTC for this highly anticipated reunion with stage and screen luminary Geoffrey Rush, as the social-climbing and butt of all jokes, Malvolio.