A Libidinous Frenzy That Is Hard to Resist LONDON - You can't go home again? Try telling that to Mark Rylance, the maverick English actor who a decade ago made waves as an Olivia in "Twelfth Night" that suggested itself as the stuff of legend. Well, Mr. Rylance is back in the same part, and with some of the same entirely male cast, and the legend has only been enlarged. Don't be fooled by the apparent recessiveness of the white-faced, black-clad figure that appears before us, a countess in mourning for her father and her brother. Once this Olivia is sent into the love-induced tailspin that Shakespeare's comedy famously charts (a "madness" in the language of the text), Mr. Rylance resembles a geisha gone lustfully gaga: Resist her advances if you dare. Truth to tell, Tim Carroll's production - first seen this summer at Shakespeare's Globe before its current commercial transfer to the Apollo Theatre - is hard to resist, and not only because it trades in the broad, audience-seducing theatrics that give the Thames-side venue its singular vigor. Never one to do things by halves, Mr. Rylance gives full vent to the libidinous frenzy that takes over a fawn-eyed creature who at first sight barely seems corporeal - note the ease with which the actor all but floats across the stage. The result, as it happens, tends to leave behind those in the cast who don't possess either Mr. Rylance's technique (Johnny Flynn as an unusually blank Viola) or his innately comic cut-and-thrust (Roger Lloyd Pack's rather strenuous Andrew Aguecheek). But the ensemble players who fall into line with their star don't just keep up with Mr. Rylance, they at times outpace him. Paul Chahidi, for instance, is a bosomy wonder as the gentlewoman Maria, here configured afresh as a cunning, low-down figure of malice as well as mirth. The object of Maria's guile, Malvolio, is played by Stephen Fry, the British pundit, television personality and all-purpose wit who with "Twelfth Night" signals his own return to the London stage nearly 18 years after he walked out of the Simon Gray play "Cell Mates," leaving a theatrical scandal in his wake. In the event, Mr. Fry offers a dignified, excellently spoken account of a character who suffers a far-from-comic fate amplified on this occasion by a hint of sweetness behind the bluff facade. And yet, Mr. Rylance's ingenuity prevails even in this context. Confronted with the cross-gartered sight of her steward in the process of being publicly laid low, Olivia for the first time in my experience lets out the single exclamation, "Malvoli - oh!" It was five and a half years ago that the American actor John Lithgow made his British stage debut, appearing with the Royal Shakespeare Company as Malvolio at Stratford-upon-Avon in a "Twelfth Night" that never got to London. The two-time Tony Award winner has now reached the capital in a separate standard-bearer from the English repertoire, "The Magistrate," the Arthur Wing Pinero comedy that puts a premium on the ever-vexatious fact of age. The advancing years scarcely rattle Mr. Lithgow's character, Aeneas Posket, the justice of the title who carries about him a puffed-up quality to which the much-maligned "Twelfth Night" character would surely relate. But time's passage more than bedevils his far-younger wife, Agatha (Nancy Carroll), to the extent that she pretends to be 31 when she is, in fact, 36. That deception might not matter were Agatha not the mother from her first marriage to a rampantly horny son, Cis (Joshua McGuire), who is in actuality 19. Even though the math would make him all of 14. So what, you might ask. Well, look at Wikipedia and see the numerous entries that leave exact birth dates out. And writing in 1885, Pinero wants to skewer hypocrisy and social mores while having farcical fun en route, and Timothy Sheader's National Theatre production is best taken in that spirit as a seasonal divertissement. Those wanting actual belly laughs can look elsewhere. "The Magistrate" offers up a troupe of onstage musicians to supply scene-change music, though the faux-Gilbert and Sullivan ditties here pay fewer dividends than the ever-evolving songs of the Craze in "One Man, Two Guvnors," an earlier (and ongoing) National success. On opening night, I was conscious of willing myself into an enforced jollity rather than surrendering to spontaneous good cheer, though Mr. Lithgow and Ms. Carroll are charming, whether separately or together, and the springy Mr. McGuire's hair put me in mind of a plane nearing lift off. Let's hope as the run continues that the evening approaches those same heights.