Twelfth Night

Giving a play a Bollywood makeover runs the risk of turning the whole shebang into a gimmick, not least because Bollywood is normally associated with being kitsch and over the top.

Yet Stephen Beresford's excellent production, which uproots Illyria to modern-day Bombay and employs a multiethnic cast, cleverly ensures the play, rather than the style, remains the thing. It keeps the Bollywood trappings to a minimum while also marrying the genre's core quality of populist entertainment to that of Shakespeare's.

Neha Dubey is a fine, stroppy, imperial Olivia, whose cold indifference to poor Malvolio neatly reflects the problematic class relations in both the play and modern-day India, while Shereen Martineau's much more found in the excellent comedy between Shiv Grewal's intoxicated Sir Toby Belch, dressed like a 1970s porn star and Paul Bazely's charmingly pathetic Sir Andrew Aguecheek, particularly in the letter deception scene with Malvolio, farcically played out between washing lines.

Silent details, such as a man passing by on a rickshaw, add a poetic sense of setting, while Sara Dhillon's delightful soundtrack reflects the play's undercurrent of melancholy, extended and complicated by Kulvinder Ghir's rather sinister Feste who is cleverly presented here as a eunuch, as though to comment further on the play's tricksy ambiguity towards transgender sexual desire.

Until Oct 30, Albery Theatre, St Martin's Lane WC2, Mon to Sat 7.30pm, Wed and Sat mats

2.30pm, £17.50 to £37.50. Tel: 0870 060 6621.

Tube: Leicester Square