Ephesus is a place of dreams, and nightmares in Jonathan Munby's production, which relocates this city, full of illusion and confusion, to a mythical suburb close to Los Angeles. Here a handcuff-happy traffic cop swaggers, the quack doctor Pinch holds a revivalist meeting with a little help from a couple of Ku Klux Klan lookalikes and when Egeon spins his sorry story of the tragic loss of his shipwrecked family of wife and twin sons everyone hangs on to his words as if he were Robert McKie giving a master storytelling class.
In case you haven't quite grasped the idea, Mike Britton's neat but simple design ensures that the Ephesus town name even looks like the famous Hollywood sign set in the hills above tinsel town. Fortunately, this relocation only goes so far. These beautiful dreamers sport no bad American accents, even if they are decked out in dire early-1970s psychedelic fashions. It all sounds rather gimmicky, but it works well enough, although - as is almost always the case with The Comedy of Errors - the harder you try to make it funny, the less funny it is.
Despite atmospheric music and lighting that suggests sunshine and shadows playing across a moody sea, Munby's production never really walks that delicious knife-edge between farce and tragedy or shows how close the mad romp of mistaken identities comes to ruining everybody's lives. Even at the end when Rebecca Johnson's headstrong Adriana refuses her husband's advances and flounces off, you know that there is no real damage done.
Visually the production has plenty of fun with the idea of mirror images, particularly in the scene where Antipholus of Ephesus is barred from his own house and the two Dromios - one outside the building and the other within - almost, but not quite, encounter each other through the letter box. But although this is Shakespeare's shortest play and it is spoken speedily, the production still lacks the pace needed to give it a real comic edge, and the actors too often play it for laughs rather than playing it for real. This sunny production probably needs a week to mature and deepen; then the two Dromios' final walk into the sunset could really be something to cheer.
· Until June 11. Box office: 0114-249 6000.
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