The Comedy of Errors (more or less) review: Shakespeare with a fun twist

Contemporary spin on the Bard’s comedy is ‘quite mad’, but has ‘plenty of laughs’

The Comedy of Errors (more or less) at Shakespeare North Playhouse 
The Bard ‘neatly updated to resonate with a 21st century audience’
(Image credit: Patch Dolan)

When the Shakespeare North Playhouse – a wooden replica of a 16th century theatre, housed in a gleamingly modern building – opened in the Lancashire town of Prescot last summer, The Observer’s architecture critic, Rowan Moore, described it as “a hybrid of the authentic and the improvised… of the scholarly and the popular, and of ancient and modern”. And he could equally have been describing this “thoroughly engaging” new production, said Clare Brennan, also in The Observer – a slickly contemporary spin on The Comedy of Errors, written by Elizabeth Godber and Nick Lane. In the programme, they say that their ambition, in “messing about” with Shakespeare, was to give audiences a “fun night” – and this “more than fulfils” it.

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