PRINCIPAL CAST: Helen Cooper (Olivia); Janet Dibley (Viola); William Hope (Orsino); Robert O'Mahoney (Sir Toby Belch); Simon Roberts (Sir Andrew Aguecheek); David Ross (Malvolio).

This production ran from 6 - 28 February 1987.

Clive Rowe made his professional Shakespearean debut in this production while he was in his third year at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

"Steven Pimlott's eruption lets loose the subconscious on Shakespeare's text in a liberating, exhilarating, surreal celebration of midwinter misrule. With associate director Martin Duncan, and designer Tom Cairns, he has overthrown reason for bizarre, impressionist, Montypythonry. Duke Orsino...broods and pines to Mozart and Brubeck. Ship-wrecked Viola...emerges from beneath the Crucible's bare trust [sic] state [sic] into a world where the styles of Welfare State and Fellini meet. Robert O'Mahoney plays Sir Toby as a fiercely ageing hippy in vest and braces, lurking and larking below stairs with Rosalind Knight's mature Maria, and a hapless Aguecheek...A yellow box is their cramped and cluttered suburban kitchen. On the fridge, from which Sir Toby helps himself to wine, there's a fish tank. On top of the box, Sebastian and Antonio sit in the snow. Christmas cards and torn paperchains decorate the grander halls. One scene is overlaid on another to pick up the pace. Breathtakingly, it works. Fabian [Clive Rowe], who's always seemed to me superfluous, makes sense here as a bouncer. And in the last act, against a backdrop of mountain peaks, the forestage slowly floods. It just seems somehow right."