It begins not with a joke but with a threatened execution. Shakespeare's 1594 comedy is a play that needs to be taken seriously, and so it is in David Farr's intriguing production. It provides more welcome evidence that after years in the doldrums, Bristol Old Vic is at last very much on the up. This may not be the funniest Comedy of Errors you'll ever see - although there are some inspired farcical moments - but it is undoubtedly one of the most interesting. It is almost as if you can peer inside the characters' brains as they struggle to understand the bewildering sequence of misunderstandings and events that finally ends with the discovery that there are two sets of twins on the loose in Ephesus.
Is Ephesus a real place or merely a collective dream or nightmare? It is certainly a pretty spooky, unsettling city in Ti Green's superb design, which evokes both a monolithic 1920s totalitarian state and a state of mind, ladders stretching upwards into the sky and staircases leading nowhere. There are strange unsettling noises, the all-powerful Duke is a disembodied voice and Dr Pinch walks around with a copy of Freud. This is a place of high anxiety, a labyrinth where the protagonists become so confused by being mistaken for someone else that insanity threatens.
The laughter here erupts less from the kind of fancy stage business that is so often associated with this play as from the dissolving line between laughter and hysteria, between sanity and insanity. Adriana takes to the bottle (champagne, naturally) and her upright husband increasingly has the look of a man whose brain has become so constipated he struggles to evacuate his thoughts and make sense of what is happening to him. Daisy Haggard's Luciana offers a dryly comic foil to her more emotional sister, and the two sweet-faced Dromios are just right: the same and yet completely distinct, and ultimately touched by worried wonder at the strangeness of the world where you can look at another and discover yourself.
· Until October 25. Box office: 0117-987 7877.
