I, Malvolio (St James Cavalier), written and performed by Tim Crouch, opens as the audience trickles in and sees the tall figure of a man wearing badly soiled and torn underwear and a flapped cap.

He has horns, and he looks disapprovingly at us, sometimes muttering or growling at one person or another. He then launches into a rapid speech voicing his utter distaste for the kind of society he thinks we represent: superficial, value-less, fun-loving; the society that has condemned him and nearly destroyed him.

Gradually, he begins to introduce his story, that of the best-known character in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. But this, only after he has insisted again and again that he is not mad, as he has falsely been accused of being.

“I am not mad” and Malvolio’s famous last line in the play, “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you” are repeated obsessively throughout the piece (around 70 minutes long, when I watched it).

Malvolio has been a faithful steward of the Countess Olivia and has striven to keep her household disciplined despite the profligate Sir Toby’s efforts to disrupt it. But it is this that leads to a conspiracy by Toby and others to make a fool of him, by gulling him into believing Olivia to be in love with him.

It is a cruel trick, since he is in love with her. Crouch’s Malvolio is angry much of the time, but his softer humanity comes out when he refers with gloomy sadness to his love for Olivia. He feels that she has ill-treated him when she fell in love with Viola/Cesario and then ended marrying the girl’s brother, Sebastian. All those who know the play know that at one point Malvolio is treated as a madman and immured in a dark room, a common treatment for insane persons in Shakespeare’s time.

In Crouch’s version, Malvolio’s imprisonment has lasted for a long time, hence his disgusting apparel. Crouch’s long rant changes from minute to minute, but all the time it is an indictment of people like us who snigger and guffaw at his predicament.

Crouch, a very experienced actor, shows himself throughout to be in entire control

There are explosions about the characters in Twelfth Night – people like Olivia, Orsino, Viola and Sebastian, whose behaviour is much madder than anything Malvolio does.

His revenge on society takes partly the form of making people in the audience uncomfortable by directing strongly disapproving words towards them.

He even makes the audience carry out actions he needs to be done, most notably by getting someone to kick him in the backside where his underwear is noticeably torn.

At one point he tries to disturb his audience by preparing to hang himself with the aid of two members of the audience, one of whom was clearly discomposed by the whole thing.

I myself thought this episode the least disturbing of the evening, as I found it difficult to imagine that Crouch was actually going to use that nasty-looking noose.

Crouch, a very experienced actor, shows himself throughout to be in entire control, and is surely using audience participation throughout in anti-panto mode.

Everything is meant to rouse not good-humoured laughter but uneasy sniggers and forced guffaws. What is even cleverer is the closing part of the piece, in which Crouch washes his face and then puts on make-up.

After having (with the audience’s aid) divested himself of his soiled apparel, he carefully puts on a smart gray suit, white stockings, white shirt and wig.

He stands before the audience as the dignified upper servant he was, smarter looking than most of us. That is his real revenge: showing us that the people in Illyria – and people like us, who are next of kin to them – have been guilty of treating a respectable figure of their ilk so unconscionably.

Crouch’s rant is cleverly conceived and developed, but of course it deliberately tries to make us forget that “cakes and ale” have always played an essential role in social life.

All those who have tried to restrain it are not infrequently seen as enemies of society.

Shakespeare’s Malvolio is pompous and intolerant and is bound to fall foul of those unthinking people – most people – who are fond of having a good time.

Though Shakespeare elicits some pity from the audience for his comeuppance as he does for Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, can we doubt his view that Malvolio deserved a lesson, if not the very harsh one Malvolio is given?

No doubt Crouch would agree with this, but his tragi-comic Malvolio is a character well worth seeing and pondering.