Jerry Springer: The Opera at the National Theatre and a rap version of The Comedy of Errors in the West End - what's happening? Don't tell me these bastions of establishment theatre are waking up to the fact that we are in the 21st century and that safe revivals of last-century American musicals or Arsenic and Old Lace just don't do it for large parts of the population. This is very definitely not the Boys from Syracuse. Sure, this hippity-hoppity Bomb-itty is no more than a piece of clever, rude, raucous fun - but, like Jerry Springer, it doesn't have the pretension to be anything more.
It is also true that it doesn't sit as comfortably in the New Ambassadors as it did in the Pleasance in Edinburgh last summer. What this show really needs is for somebody to rip the seats out of the theatre. Even so, its verbal pyrotechnics would impress even the most dedicated Shakespearean scholar and its energy and onstage DJ attract a new crowd, most of whom probably thought Shakespeare was a bore when they were at school.
If the linguistic invention of Shakespeare's 17th-century vernacular is neatly transposed into 21st-century street speak, the story is no less cleverly transformed. The two sets of male identical twins, the children of New York hip-hoppers, who were placed in different foster homes after their father dies, are here reunited 20 years later in a skyscraper-filled, graffiti-washed world. There is even a rumbustious nod towards the boy-plays-girl traditions of Elizabethan theatre. The playing style, however, is somewhat closer to the annual Hackney Empire panto.
The evening is never a drag, is often very funny, but it is a pity that it has been shoehorned into a traditional West End two acts with an interval format. In Edinburgh the show was meaner and leaner - the padding does show here. This is certainly not an evening for all tastes, but it is a taste that isn't very well represented in the West End, and the quickfire, quick-change performances are a sheer joy. These guys deserve to be paid full whack for every character they play.
· Until July 12. Box office: 020-7369 1761.
