The cue for the production is the second part of the title, ‘Or What You Will’ and the vibe is a boundary-less kaleidoscope of colour and gender, feeding off spiked Kool-Aid. The production is conceived as a communal trip, an Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, with a bunch of late-sixties hedonists deciding to ‘do’ the play somebody had left lying around. It is a clever device, which nicely sets up the inspired pick ‘n’ mix casting. The resulting ‘trip’ delivers a burlesque on love, desire, gender-identity, class and self-deceit.

An angry Orsino (Colette Dalal Tchantcho), a brightly Fedora’d, swaggering popinjay, as a member of the upper classes is used to getting what he wants -and what he wants is luuve. Clearly out of his depth with the coolly grey-suited, svelte and sophisticated Olivia (Lisa Dwyer Hogg) he persists in attempting to woo something he perhaps, deep down, knows he cannot have, nevertheless persisting in the self-deceit by working himself up into an erotic fug with endless music and barely pubescent embassies.

Meanwhile Olivia has been keeping her own spring-loaded sexuality under a life-sucking cloak of mourning for her dead brother. It is released by the same embassy, namely Viola (Jade Ogugua) whose eloquent expression of her own passion is the firing pin that releases and beguiles Olivia’s erotic desires.

The puritanical Malvolio (Christopher Green), slightly fey and with ideas well above his station, is gulled into releasing his inner ‘Village People’ persona, swapping his bowler hat for a crotch-nipping, yellow and black fetish outfit.

Dawn Sievewright as Lady Tobi, is as un-Falstffian as ever a Sir Toby could be. By mere fluke of genetics on the distaff side of the Belch line she is an unstoppable force of drunken merriment, a brazen pub singer and one for whom toping is a brave calling rather than any kind of weakness. A high-energy jester for whom, we feel, a moment of quiet sobriety is a moment wasted.

Foil to her unquenchable appetites is Guy Hughes’s forlorn innocent, Andrew Aguecheek, who in truth wants for little other than a little self-belief and the love of a good woman.

Feste (Dylan Read) a zany to his fingertips, one could imagine working comfortably in original The Lord Chamberlain’s Men. In his movement an angular jumble of bones with the flexibility and agility of a cat and, like a cat, choosing which master or mistress will feed him on any particular occasion.

The vibe is carried through by the music of Meilyr Jones (Curio) whose effective and affecting music at times recalled the eclecticism of The Incredible String Band.

In this co-production with the Royal Lyceum Edinburgh designer, Ana Inés Jabares-Pita, has had some fun with the colourful 60s/70s costumes which help to both define and liberate the characters.

Director, Wils Wilson, in plumping for the comedy, has had to compromise on the potential for satire on class entitlement and insensitive patronage, which in this production remains inchoate. On the plus side she gives us a Shakespeare for all, but especially the young who could quite happily come without even a nodding acquaintance with the script and be bowled over by the accessibility and joy of creatively conceived theatre.

★★★★☆  Graham Wyles   19^th October 2018