Twelfth Night is such a gift of a play that it’s always doubly disappointing when a production doesn’t make of it quite all it could.

For my money it’s up there with Hamlet for depth and richness, so it’s a pity that Gregory Doran, director of David Tennant’s recent terrific RSC Hamlet, doesn’t work his subtle magic so effectively here.

The closing moments show the masterstrokes of which Doran is capable. After the mayhem of twins and shipwrecks and ill-matched marriages has been tidied up into a hasty happy ending, Feste sings a lugubrious song about the rain.

Instead of having him stand alone, Doran gets the three characters who have been egregiously ill-treated by Act Five — Antonio, Aguecheek and, above all, Malvolio — to cross slowly in front of him. It’s a startling reminder of the darkness just below the surface of this scintillating comedy.

Elsewhere, it’s a stop-start evening. Richard Wilson should be dream casting as Malvolio, the snitty steward who is tricked into thinking that his mistress Olivia has the hots for him, but isn’t. He fails to pounce upon this peach of a role in the way Derek Jacobi did last year, but instead appears cowed by it. Despite a delightful turn from the tartan-trousered James Fleet as Aguecheek, the “lighter people” make rather heavy weather of it.

Robert Jones’s lovely design whisks the action back to the crumbling-pillared Levant of Byron’s time, although we’d need more elegant ruins than this to distract us from the fatal lack of poignancy that Olivia (Alexandra Gilbreath, too breathy) and Viola (Nancy Carroll, too bluff) manage to generate around their confused situations.

Oddly, the usually wafty role of the lovestruck Orsino (a confident Jo Stone-Fewings) comes into greater focus. It’s that sort of Night.

Until 27 February. Information: 0844 800 1110, www.rsc.org.uk.