Bang, and the boredom’s gone...

THE COMEDY OF ERRORS, Royal Exchange, Manchester.
FORMER Paines Plough artistic director Roxana Silbert’s production of this shortest of Shakespeare’s works cuts through the Bard like Cillit Bang through grease.

The play that can’t help but be mostly good fun takes on a swift new impetus, shod of its interval and coming in at exactly 100, drag-free minutes. If there are cuts in the text, they aren’t obvious.

For those unfamiliar with the story, Antipholus and Dromio, his servant, are each half of identical pairs of twins, separated by an accident and now living in different countries.

Antipholus of Syracuse and his Dromio are looking for their respective other halves, among other things, in Ephesus, where Antipholus’s father is also searching.

The two sets of twins are kept from each other for much of the play, the confusion among merchants, lovers, wives, servants and the law growing as the minutes tick by.

As the play reaches its climax, the twins are reunited, mostly everyone is happy and a good laugh is had by all — and that goes double for the audience.

The thing about Comedy of Errors is that there is very little more to it: a company that can make you laugh with its frantic ins and outs or error and confusion is always on to a winner — even if it is almost impossible to find two sets of identical acting twins and you have to allow productions artistic licence.

As it happens, Sam Collings and Jack Farthing are a reasonably close match for build and looks, and their identical costumes swing the deal.

As for Dromio, Michael Jibson is a sort if rounded-off Ron Weasley (of Harry Potter fame), while if current comedy actor du jour, James Corden, needs a stand-in, Owain Arthur would fit the bill. Again, the same clothes mostly maketh both men.

Performances are broad, like the story, while set and subtlety are deliberately kept to a minimum.

I’m not entirely sure why a large circle of the stage rises on hydraulic jacks at one end towards the end, but I suppose they had to spend the set budget on something. Good fun throughout.