HOLLYWOOD maverick Billy Bob Thornton reckons Shakespeare is "over-rated, bulls**t, and just a bunch of soap operas". Post-rant, here is the first chance to pit Billy Bard against Billy Bob.

Twelfth Night is top of the Shakespeare comedy hit parade: a tragic-comic tale of love and conflict where heightened language and low blows, unrequited love and dizzying passion, mistaken identities and dazzling wordplay, yellow stockings and colourful comic characters roll into one satisfying whole. This is a five-course meal, where soap opera is but a TV dinner.

In the alchemist hands of English Touring Theatre director Stephen Unwin the language is alive, the story telling vibrant, and the playing a joy. The setting is traditional 16th century, Becs Andrews designing a raked wooden stage with a theatrical curtain at the rear that pulls away to reveal a picturesque Illyrian seascape. Here the night bubbles up as pleasingly as an Aero, each interweaving story given due measure.

The "flowery" stuff is the convoluted love story involving shipwrecked Viola (Georgina Rich) and identical twin brother Sebastian (Gareth David-Lloyd), lovelorn Orsino (a Byronesque Dugald Bruce-Lockhart) and screen-goddess beauty Olivia (Catherine Walker). The bravura comedy is entrusted to Sir Toby Belch (Michael Cronin, who pours the port into portly) and upper-class twit Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Geoffrey Beevers); the wise words and Radio 4 at 6.30pm wit go to Feste (hangdog Alan Williams).

Best of all, enjoy Susan Brown's whirling Maria, truly tickling Des McAleer's puritanical, vainglorious Malvolio like a trout in this glorious Twelfth Night.

* Runs until Saturday. Box office: (01904) 623568.

Published: 08/10/2004