Any Shakespeare production demands the creation of a plausible world on stage. Nancy Meckler ingeniously sets this multi-twinned comedy in a grotesque, faintly sinister fairyland: more than once I thought of the Germanic tales of Heinrich Hoffmann.
As at Stratford last summer, Meckler and her designer Katrina Lindsay conjure up a seriously eerie Ephesus. This is a town where the Duke issues death threats from a barber's chair and where the streets teem with pickpockets, floozies, three-card monte tricksters, mad hatters and epicene chicken-sellers. It is both carnivalesque and creepy, and it makes an ideal context for a play in which the visiting Syracusans Antipholus and Dromio find themselves mysteriously equipped with shrewish wives, gargantuan girlfriends and gold chains.
My one quibble concerns Meckler's desire to illustrate the verbal jokes. There's an intriguing passage early on where the visiting twins swap one-liners on the nature of time: a key theme in the play. Here, however, the time-theme gets buried under rude by-play with barber's wig-blocks. What Meckler does bring out is the disorientation of the Syracusan twins and the strange affinity between this early comedy and Shakespeare's late romances. There is an extraordinary mixture of joy and heart-swelling emotion in the family reunion that anticipates Pericles or The Winter's Tale.
Meckler has cast the play cannily so that the two sets of twins are just sufficiently dissimilar for the audience to be one step ahead of the game. Joe Dixon's Syracusan Antipholus has a superb wide-eyed wonderment, as of a man caught in a waking dream, that easily distinguishes him from Christopher Colquhoun who makes his Ephesian twin a rattled smoothie. Their browbeaten servants, beautifully played by Jonathan Slinger and Forbes Masson, are harder to tell apart with their corkscrewing Struwwelpeter quiffs; and their final mutual V-signs suggest that the underclass always has to work harder to cling on to its sense of self.
The play's domestic side is intelligently mined, with Suzanne Burden turning the Ephesian Adriana into a ferocious shrew who learns a lesson in moderation from Frances Jeater's wise Abbess. But, although this astonishing comedy is an infinite resource on which Shakespeare later draws, Meckler brings out its own singular quality: the disturbing sense of being sucked into a magic maelstrom where one is in constant danger of losing one's own identity.
· Until January 28. Box office: 0870 950 0940.
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