Perhaps all you need to know about Tony Cownie's bawdy, jolly romp of a production is that the second act opens with a song. More precisely, it begins with a new medley, peppered with Shakespeare's best-known lines, and with the emphasis on euphemistic gags. "Is this a dagger I see before me," our musician sings, in full hey-nonny-no style, "or are you just pleased to see me?" It goes down a storm, as does the entire show, which Cownie has shaped as a farce, an extended Benny Hill sketch on the theme of mistaken identity.
This is one of the few options open to directors of Shakespeare's fast-paced early comedy, whose shallow characterisation offers only the merest hint of what was to come in the late romantic comedies. To approach the play in this way may lose some of its existential angst and subtleties (the sense of bewilderment felt by Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse, for instance, briefly landed in Ephesus but seemingly known to all), but it does pull the audience into the world of the play.
The happenings on stage are strange beyond coincidence: two sets of twins and their parents find each other after 28 years of separation, the twins in identical garb. But Cownie familiarises the events in a number of ways. Set pieces take inspiration from farce, pantomime and even cartoons - a Tom and Jerry-style violin plays a high-pitched squeak as a window is opened and closed. Hayden Griffin's set looks like medieval Edinburgh, Iain Johnstone's music works like a film score to underline mood, and the cast plays pluckily to the audience.
The result is enjoyably melodramatic, but at some points underlines the play's limitations. The plot is so creaky that a reliance on stock formats and well-tried tricks (the whole cast in a chase around the stage to Keystone Cops music; the jeweller played from the John Inman school of camp acting) can make the play feel two-dimensional between the gags.
It's no surprise that when the identity of the twins' mother is revealed - she is the abbess, played as Hattie Jacques would have played her in a Carry On film - the audience laughs heartily. Just as you might be thinking that this isn't what Shakespeare would have wanted, a flourish of fireworks bursts into the sky on stage. You forget your qualms. The party is over.
· Until November 17. Box office: 0131-248 4848.
