Last year the theatre world was rocked when the board of Shakespeare’s Globe announced that their new artistic director Emma Rice would serve only two years. Their argument was that, by introducing full stage lighting and sound amplification, Rice was ignoring the reasons behind the Globe’s construction, namely to try and approximate the performance conditions of old Will’s time; she was basically turning it into any other venue, only without a roof.

The whole affair was badly handled and embarrassing, but it hasn’t stopped yet. Now in her second and last season at the Globe, Rice seems to reckon she has nothing to lose and is going for broke. Her Twelfth Night has already been called, by another reviewer, the theatrical equivalent of a scorched-earth policy.

It’s not the lighting. It’s not the sound. It’s not even about treating the play as a musical – Twelfth Night has always had several songs in it, although admittedly none of them was “We Are Family”. No, it’s that in order to make room for the singing, the dancing, the new gags replacing old gags that didn’t need replaced, the new gags in their own right and so on, what she’s got rid of every time is Shakespeare.

As a result, vast numbers of the casual visitors that form such a part of the Globe’s market will now go away under the misconception that this play is all about the jokes and the capers when in fact it's one of Shakespeare's darkest comedies. They’ll think he had some modish ideas about gender-bending, what with Viola disguising herself as a man, rather than more complex notions of identity in general and appearance v. reality. Most seriously, they’ll imagine Feste is a bloke in a sequinned frock – bearded drag artist Le Gateau Chocolat – rather than one of the greatest fool-characters in all of drama who, here, has 90% of his lines cut, including pretty much all the stuff that makes the play so ambivalent, and most of the remainder given to somebody else.

It's not that different equals bad – I've seen a production of Much Ado About Nothing that included not only gender-bending but King Kong, Nosferatu, a Hawaiian luau, Benedick in a tiger costume and that opened with Leonard Cohen's "Everybody Knows", and it still got to more of the themes and spirit of the play than Rice's Twelfth Night does.

Do you remember those old commercials for Terry’s Chocolate Orange where Dawn French would declare, “It’s not Terry’s – it’s mine!”?  Well, Emma Rice seems to feel that way about Shakespeare’s Globe. She is – let me be clear – terrific at what she does; this simply isn’t the place for it. Here, her gung-ho approach to her original material ends up spreading ignorance, the exact opposite of the Globe’s purpose.

Written for The Lady.