The Comedy of Errors Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon***
Two options confront the director of this masterpiece about separated twins. You can treat it as a seriously mysterious comedy, as Tim Supple did in the last RSC revival. Or you can view it as madcap farcical romp, as Lynne Parker does in her spirited Stratford debut. With its nods towards Harold Lloyd, Keaton and Laurel and Hardy, Parker's production is a palpable crowd-pleaser. What you lose is something of the play's emotional reality.
To be fair, Parker treats the plight of the execution-awaiting Egeon with due gravity: incarcerated in a grimly contemporary Turkish jail, Paul Greenwood delivers his opening speeches with riveting stillness. But once we enter the world of the twin Antipholuses and Dromios, language takes second place to escalating comic business. We get joke suitcases, shadow monsters, stand-up routines and funny merchants, all leading towards a frenzied Keystone Cops-style chase in which the permutated twins and their creditors are joined, for no apparent reason, by a knight in clanking armour and a lumbering dromedary.
It's all very jolly but Parker underplays both the Syracusan twins' bewilderment at finding themselves in a dream-like Ephesus where they are constantly recognised, and the emotional dilemma of the luckless Luciana, wooed by the man she takes to be her brother-in-law. What you get instead is a considerable display of physical skill. David Tennant's Antipholus of Syracuse at one point does a slide down a staircase-rail and across the stage that Barrault might have envied. And both Ian Hughes and Tom Smith as the Dromios possess an impeccable, poker-faced physical precision. It just seems a pity that Hughes's virtuosic description of a gargantuan kitchen wench is gradually turned into an applause- begging vaudeville routine.
There is a vital distinction between delighting an audience and pandering to it; Parker's production sometimes leans towards the latter. But it would be churlish to deny that it is executed with great elan and, at the end, as the reunited twins gaze at their other selves with a curious wonderment, the inherent magic of Shakespeare's play triumphantly re-asserts itself.
In rep until October 7. Box office: 01789 403403
***** Unmissable **** Recommended *** Enjoyable ** Mediocre * Terrible
