Twelfth Night, based around a story of mistaken identity, is one of Shakespeare’s most popular comedies, and the European Theatre Group perform the madcap tale with aplomb. The whole production is extremely polished and professional, which is unsurprising given that the cast and crew have just returned from a two week tour of the continent, visiting theatres in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland, as well as performing in The Courtyard Theatre, London. They have now returned to the ADC for a triumphant home run.

The acting was uniformly excellent. Ben Walsh made a wonderfully malignant Malvolio, with a beautifully judged expression of permanent distaste. From a comic angle Rosanna Suppa as Feste and Zak Ghazi-Torbati as Sir Toby Belch truly stole the show, establishing a wonderful rapport with the audience almost from the first line of the play, and ably assisted by Megan Gilbert as Maria and Ryan Monk as Sir Andrew Aguecheek. However the (slightly) more serious acting of the four lead characters made an effective contrast to the high jinks of the rest. Aoife Kennan was particularly good as the cross-dressing heroine Viola, while Joe Pitts as her identical twin brother, Sebastian, made the most of a role with slightly less scope for interpretation. Ed Limb as Count Orsino and Julia Kass as Olivia were both good, although such was Kass’ enthusiasm for her part that on occasion her lines became quite unintelligible, as she made shrill and eager declarations of love to Viola, believing her to be a boy named Cesario.

Music and dance were ably incorporated into the performance, with several solo songs from Feste, and plenty of enthusiastic and well-choreographed dance scenes. I particularly liked how Feste, Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek danced and fooled their way through the scene changes, so that even moving the set around became an entertaining part of the performance.  Often the addition of dance in a play can seem gratuitous and unnecessary, but in this instance it suited the atmosphere of the play perfectly.

The set and costumes were as good as the acting, with a particularly beautiful painted screen as backdrop, while several Christmas trees lent a festive air to proceedings. On the whole, it was a lovely treat for the start of term, which will definitely have you laughing out loud.