If music be the food of love, do a sound check. This is a Twelfth Night for the festival season, the stage littered with amps and flight cases, the rumble of bands in nearby tents always pulsing. Hard-rocking siblings Viola and Sebastian appear to have been separated by one too many pills at a rave. Sir Toby Belch arrives to a riff by Arctic Monkeys, Maria sports a Purple Rain T-shirt, and Olivia launches into Stay by (who else?) Shakespears Sister.
The hedonistic setting suggests disorder is imminent, which makes it all the funnier when Les Dennis turns up as Malvolio to quieten a late-night racket. The culprit is Maria (Kate James), who has been leading her fellow revellers in a round of Blondie’s Maria (natch) and invited two audience members to join in the dancing. “Who are you?” splutters Dennis at the unexpected guests as they hurry back to their seats.
Playing Shakespeare for the first time and acquitting himself well, Dennis plays Malvolio as a man whose fastidiousness is a symptom of his lack of wit. Plain speaking and precise in his blue three-piece suit, he has too little imagination to be anything but a dullard. His re-emergence in quilted yellow coat, DayGlo Crocs and spiked grey hair makes him look like a superannuated rock star – and he is just as clueless.
The theme keeps things lively but, in Jimmy Fairhurst’s full-throttled production for Not Too Tame and Shakespeare North Playhouse, it makes more sense at some times than others. You could believe the hard-drinking Belch (Jack Brown) and Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Reuben Johnson) have signed up for a festival afterparty, but where does that put the mourning Olivia (Purvi Parmar) or the love-struck Orsino (Johnson again)?
If the fast-and-loose approach to the language is energising, the production could also do with more clarity on key plot points. Above all, the romance is tepid: you can accept Olivia’s attraction to a disguised Viola (Georgia Frost), but there is no similar spark between Viola and Orsino. At the end, it is nice to see the reunion of Viola and Sebastian (Tom Sturgess), but harder to care about the other couplings.
• At Shakespeare North Playhouse, Prescot, until 29 June
