"Twelfth Night". RSC, Stratford-upon-Avon

The great and much-loved actor Timothy West died just three weeks before Twelfth Night opened in December, starring his son Samuel as Malvolio. Tim may not have been a Knight like Sir Ian, Sir Ken or (thank god) Sir Toby. But his talent, his experience and his benevolence elevated him to the status of a kind of theatrical favourite uncle to the nation. His loss hovers with a gentle and mournful smile above this beautiful production, like the deceased father whose passing has shut Olivia up in grief. Her eventual return to life and love feels like part of the healing process after this real-world bereavement. Maybe Tim’s spirit is watching over this show, and as a result it’s suffused with tenderness. Neither too funny nor too sad, it has plenty of moments of hilarity, tempered by scenes of pain, regret and cruelty. It’s the most balanced Twelfth Night I’ve ever seen, and perhaps the closest to what Shakespeare himself originally intended.

As well as being one of our leading Shakespearean actors – he has appeared in twenty of the Bard’s plays – Samuel West is a deeply thoughtful and intelligent enthusiast. Whether sharing his passion for ornithology on Radio 4’s Tweet of the Day or uncovering some little-known nugget about his current project (such as the fact that Twelfth Night is called Thirteenth Night in Sweden because they start counting the days on Christmas Eve) Sam delights in detail. And he has found a reading of Malvolio that gently and persuasively refigures this puritanical popinjay as a figure to be both pitied and sympathised with. What, after all, is his crime? He remonstrates with Sir Toby Belch and his friends for making an unseemly uproar in the small hours. Quite right! He harbours a secret love for his mistress and an ambition to better himself. Good for him! He thinks the clown isn’t very funny. Well, normally he isn’t! These are hardly sins worthy of the sort of retribution visited upon Malvolio by Sir Toby and his friends. And so, in this production, we find ourselves warming to Malvolio from the start. His cuddly beard bespeaks not fastidiousness but furriness. His voice, inspired (or so it sounds) by Peter Cook’s E.L. Wisty character, is precise but unassuming. And when attired in cross-garters, his bared thighs are rather becoming. The final sight of Malvolio, scrabbling frantically on the floor for the torn pieces of Olivia’s forged letter, is desperately sad.

So who’s the villain?

Sir Toby, Malvolio’s nemesis, leaps into the breach. Joplin Sibtain harnesses all the character’s latent nastiness and turns him into a conniving, bullying, alcoholic thug. This Sir Toby is tied at the hip to John Hodgkinson’s Falstaff, who laid waste to Windsor in last summer’s standout RSC production of The Merry Wives. Hodgkinson was a small-town crime kingpin, out for whatever he could get, and Sibtain’s Sir Toby is cut from the same cloth. But even he eventually finds a tragic dimension, weeping on the floor at his niece Olivia’s feet, unable to put down the bottle, hating the man he’s become. This production peels back the comedy in every character and scenario, revealing the tears behind the makeup with unerring humanity.

But of course Twelfth Night is a comedy, if a dark one. And by humanising two of its most (traditionally) larger-than-life characters, director Prasanna Puwanarajah runs the risk of draining the laughter from the script. For example, the famous scene in which Malvolio is tricked into believing that he has found a love letter from his mistress, normally awash with laughs, is here dialled down in favour of keeping the situation believable. The bawdy humour of ‘her Cs, her Us and her Ts’ is deliberately negated. Instead – and this is one of the most inspired decisions of the show – much of the textual humour has been exchanged for a brilliant and unstoppable conveyor belt of visual gags. And the figure at the heart of this humour is Michael Grady-Hall’s dazzlingly funny Feste.

Grady-Hall is a natural clown, playing to the spectators like an Elizabethan Lee Evans. From his first appearance we know we’re in for something special. He extracts his giant jester outfit from an impossibly small bag, drags the entire set onto the stage with invisible ropes, and is tempted to tug a handle that says ‘PULL ME’ as it dangles from the ceiling. This Feste is a comic force that stands simultaneously inside and outside the play, making fun of both the other characters and the artifice of theatre itself. Through him (and lots of other prop-based gags, such as Orsino arriving on stage with a very small organ, or the priest holding a mug that says ‘I ♥ Jesus’), the vast majority of the comedy in this show is based in ‘business’ – and what better way for a Shakespeare production to flex its creative muscles while ensuring that the humour is accessible for all?

If Simon Godwin’s 2017 production for the National Theatre (with Tamsin Greig as Malvolia) was a riot of sexual diversity bursting with colour and music, like Rupaul’s Drag Race in fishnet iambic pentameters, Puwanarajah’s vision is more muted and poised, but no less impressive. Count Orsino’s court, rather than a haven of debauched bachelors, is a rather genteel men’s club where the gay subtext is evident to everyone but the Count himself. And the final resolution cleverly allows the characters to acknowledge their own bisexuality while still choosing (at least for now) a hetero lifestyle.

The set, inspired by the work of macabre American illustrator Edward Gorey, is a character in itself: mobile, sombre, yet concealing laughs at every turn. Dominated by a gigantic pipe organ (the largest single prop ever constructed by the RSC) it glides, shifts and occasionally overpowers the characters, all with a palette of cool, melancholic greys. Malvolio’s prison, normally a wooden shack, is here an expressionist display with twenty solid beams of light pinning the unfortunate steward like a prisoner caught trying to escape.

If there is one downside to this production’s huge (and welcome) focus on the roles of the supposed ‘sub-plot’ characters, it is that the ‘main-plot’ figures get slightly overshadowed. Gwyneth Keyworth as Viola, Freema Agyeman as Olivia and Bally Gill as Orsino all give fine performances. But they are playing second fiddle here to the sub-plot. Maybe that’s how it should be. This is Twelfth Night after all: roles get reversed. It’s time for the Lord of Misrule to take over. This production isn’t a place for those who are born great. But for stewards, clowns and drunkards, it’s a place to achieve greatness.