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A couple of years back, director Bijan Sheibani and adaptor Ben Powers managed to make a pretty fun family half-term romp out of Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ which, lest we forget, is a show about a double suicide.
By comparison ‘The Comedy of Errors’ – easily The Bard’s frothiest work – should be an open goal, and so it proves. Substantially, this is a mistaken identity comedy – arguably the mistaken identity comedy – in which twin masters (both called Antipholus) with twin servants (both named Dromio) are separated by a storm in their youth. They grow up on two different islands, inadvertently coming into contact with each other later in life, setting up a series of groan-inducingly delightful misunderstandings heavily expidited by the fact the sets of twins appear to have identical wardrobes.
There is a whole lot more plot and dialogue beyond that, but Power has hacked almost all of it away, trimming ‘The Comedy…’ down to its fun essence. On a Club Tropicana-style set, the various Dromios and Antipholi get confused, shout at each other, and get into daft fights underscored by ebulliently cartoonish sound effects that inevitably delighted the primary school-aged target audience. A chaotic climactic chase is pure slapstick delight, and the language is smartly used – the introductory sections are in modern English, until the action moves to Ephesus, where we’re told they speak ‘Shakespearean’. It’s a straight-up hoot, with too much energy bubbling through its veins for the audience to ever look even remotely bored.