SHOWING all the intellectual content that parking commandant Coun Ann Reid attributes to the Evening Press, Hollywood maverick Billy Bob Thornton reckons Shakespeare is "over-rated, bulls**t, and just a bunch of soap operas".

Last night was the first chance since that rant to pit Billy Bard against Billy Bob and to judge the stuff of West Enders against EastEnders.

Dear reader, your critic would concur with Billy Bobbins on one point. "I don't believe in all the flowery language," he says, and there are long nights, mostly in the company of Shakespeare's comedies, where you can wait an eternity for that flower to bloom rather than wilt.

Twelfth Night, however, 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, you can be assured of a production as fresh as toothpaste, the language alive, the storytelling 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.

The night bubbles up as pleasingly as an Aero, each interweaving story given due measure. There is the "flowery" stuff, the convoluted love story involving shipwrecked Viola (Georgina Rich) and identical twin brother Sebastian, lovelorn Orsini (a Byronesque Dugald Bruce-Lockhart) and the screen goddess Olivia (Catherine Walker).

There is the bravura comic stuff of boozing Sir Toby Belch (Michael Cronin, with a voice as rich as port), the upper-class twittering of Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and the wise words and Radio 4 at 6.30pm wit of Feste (hangdog Alan Williams). Above all, enjoy Susan Brown's whirling, comely Maria, truly tickling Des McAleer's puritanical, vainglorious, pilgrim-hatted Malvolio like a trout.

"We'll strive to please you every day," sings Feste at the finale, and all but Billy Bob will surely be pleased by this glorious Twelfth Night.

Updated: 11:36 Wednesday, October 06, 2004