h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

We did this play at school, and it's still one of my favourites. Cross-dressing, crashes, lesbi-gay overtones, yellow stockings and garters, being mean to those who would rise above their station, who could ask for more? The fickle nature of love, men whose feelings change with the wind and it's all about appearance. The shallowest characters I've ever met all live in this one play. Marvellous.

It is good, and very funny too. I find it amazing that such a risque play could have been publicly performed in Tudor times. Parts of it would be liable to censorship now if it wasn't Shakespeare, such as parts of Act 2 Scene 5:

Malvolio: By my life, this is my lady's hand these be her very C's, her U's and her T's and thus makes she her great P's. It is, in contempt of question, her hand.
Sir Andrew: Her C's, her U's and her T's: why that?

It must have been quite a spectacle going to the Globe, where female actors were banned, and seeing a male actor playing a female (Viola) disguised as a girl

I saw a *very* bawdy production of this in York one time. All I'll say is I've never thought that a french loaf and a pair of boxing gloves could be used to make a set of *those*!

This is my all-time favourite play, to the extent that I have seen it performed by at least 20 different companies, from school productions (much edited for the sake of decency) to the most excellent 2002 production at The Globe. And then there have been various film, TV & radio versions over the years - and the lunchtime performances of extracts by the RSC at Selfridges in the 1970s, of which I missed not one. Of course, not all the productions I've seen have been good, but the play itself never fails to enthrall me. Best productions I've seen were at the Open Air Theatre at Regents Park (mid 70s); the TV version starring Robert Lindsay (early 80s); Bristol Old Vic (late 90s); Waldorf School Bristol (late 90s) and, most brilliant of all, The Globe in 2002. The least enjoyable was a Radio 4 dramatisation, in which the lines were delivered in such expressionless tones that one could scarcely believe it was a professional production. A good thing, then, that the text of Twelfth Night is so brilliant that it can rise above even the worst of renditions!