If you could spend a day in Shakespeare's mind, how would you choose to be entertained? A cold buffet with Hamlet at Elsinore? A brisk stroll with Lear on the blasted heath? Or would you really rather skip the tragic heroes and call in for a quick one with roaring Jack Falstaff and his pals?
Alan Plater knows which he'd prefer. Last year he commented in a Guardian article that he'd always fancied a night on the tiles with Shakespeare's rude mechanicals. Northern Broadsides' chief, Barrie Rutter, spotted the remark and offered to take him up on it.
So it is that Plater has developed a throwaway remark into a rambling, musical exposé of Shakespeare's social life. It's 1599 and the first-night audience of Henry V are getting soaked. But in a nearby tavern, a posse of cut-purses, wrestlers, balladeers and bellows-menders await the arrival of the wily, balding regular who sops up their stories and puts them in his plays.
The first hour of Plater's script is a genial piece of tap-room theatre: characters wander in, introduce themselves, then melt into the hubbub of general roistering. And yet the play, like this motley collection of hopeless topers, doesn't seem to be going anywhere until the Bard bursts in just before the interval.
The second half is much more focused as Conrad Nelson's agile Shakespeare unwinds with the simple folk he professes to love. Yet if his patronage of the place seems to verge on the patronising, the affection in which he is held is tenderly encapsulated by Ruth Alexander-Rubin's comely courtesan, who takes delight in being touched by genius.
Plater gives a loose weave to this broad canvas, but casting the work in parallel with a new production of the Comedy of Errors creates the rare situation of a playwright being given more actors than he needs. Plater makes a virtue of necessity by conceiving his bellows-menders as identical twins and having Sarah Parks's salty landlady declare: "That's typical - you wait months to have your bellows mended then two turn up at once."
The payoff is that when Conor Ryan and Andrew Cryer's uncannily similar forge-technicians turn up as Antipholuses of Ephesus and Syracuse, you really are persuaded that you're seeing double. The effect is compounded by the freakily well-matched ginger features and Liverpudlian accents of Simon Holland Roberts and Conrad Nelson, who play the two Dromios like the shifty scallies you see hanging round the city centre offering to park your car for a quid.
Some Northern Broadsides productions have occasionally substituted subtlety for a certain bullish, chauvinistic charisma; here, Rutter's perky, pastel-coloured 1950s interpretation is notable for its lightness of tone. Certain vowel sounds even slip out fully rounded, and outbreaks of clog dancing are restricted to an absolute minimum.
But what really binds these two productions is Nelson's scintillating, hot jazz score - smoky, augmented chords for the Comedy of Errors, and a rollicking rag in praise of "Wee Willy Shaggers from Stratford Town" to kick off the Plater. The canny cloggers have turned in their smoothest, most toe-tapping productions to date.
· Until February 26. Box office: 01422 255266. Then touring.
