Alison Chitty's huge new acting space devised for the season at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre - so clean, clinical and empty for Hamlet - takes on a more cosily domestic appearance as tricked out by another designer, Ashley Martin-Davis, for Twelfth Night, writes Chris Gray.

A patterned carpet in mellow colours rolls from the very front of the stage all the way - and it's a long way - to the back wall where it blends with an arresting photograph depicting waves breaking on a beach in sea-girt Illyria where Viola (Zo Waites) and her brother Sebastian (Ben Meyjes) have so lately pitched up, each believing the other drowned.

Twelve grey louvred doors bisect the carpet roughly halfway along its length. In the foreground, to the left, is Orsino's palace, with its Art Deco lamp, Gauguin and Klimt pictures and day-bed - well-used, one can see, by the lovesick Duke (Jo Stone-Fewings). To the right is Olivia's home, where a grandfather clock (its case a useful hiding place for cousin Toby's booze stocks), solid upright piano and Beardsley prints reveal a household less obviously in the van of fashion.

Quite clearly, Victoria still reigns in spirit here, and certainly in the matter of mourning, with the gloomy young chatelaine (Matilda Ziegler) shrouded in black as she devotes herself to an ascetic life following the death of her father and brother. The funereal atmosphere of her home is only increased by the presence of her impossibly thin steward Malvolio (the excellent Guy Henry) gliding around like an unctuous undertaker.

A place in need of some livening up, then - even if Sir Toby (Barry Stanton) and his pals do take matters a little far, both in their personal indulgences and in their punishment of the sanctimonious steward (a hoot in his canary yellow stockings topped by black suspenders).

A fine feature of Lindsay Posner's production - besides its vivid exploration of the sexual confusions of the play - is how very funny the scenes of revelry are made, with the help of the foppish Aguecheek (Christopher Good), Mark Hadfield's Buster Keaton style (and very tuneful) Feste and Wayne Cater's well-judged Welsh Fabian, who manages to emerge from the shadows cast by the great comic creations around him to become, for once, a star character in his own right.

Likewise Alison Fiske's depiction of that shrewd plotter Maria, whose affected upper-crust tones betray a social mountaineer all too eager to become Lady Belch, even if this does mean mopping up food and booze stains that Sir Les Patterson himself might feel ashamed of from the front of the slobbish knight's bursting waistcoat.