Sean Holmes is associate artistic director at the Globe and there’s a lightness and ease about his Shakespeare productions that’s not to be scoffed at. The props and costumes here, wittily designed by Paul Wills, have just the right amount of pizazz to raise a chuckle (who knew a gold chain could be genuinely funny?). The audience interaction reels us in without overdoing it and the actors seem comfortable with the text, happy to embellish the Bard’s dialogue with their own distinctive comic gifts.
The context remains relatively untouched yet the show feels contemporary – largely down to a sort of droll knowingness that runs through the ensemble, with lines like, “Well, this is strange!”, cutting through the complex plot with amusingly glib efficiency. We’re still in the rather strange city of Ephesus, where Antipholus of Syracuse and his servant Dromio have come to seek out their long-lost twin brothers. Antipholus’s estranged parents also happen to be in town and – you guessed it – endless incidents of mistaken identity ensue.
This is one of Shakespeare’s shorter comedies and Holmes has chosen to gallop through with no interval. With this in mind, he keeps the pace motoring and the visual gags amped up high. The approach only starts to flag in the final third when all that comic seasoning starts to feel just a little overdone (Chuck in a lusty doctor! How about a wacky sister! Comic beards! Comedy boats!).
Michael Elcock, as the increasingly dazed and confused Antipholus of Syracuse, has a great line in comic yelps and gobsmacked expressions. Jordan Metcalfe, as Dromio of Syracuse, scampers about the stage with excellent comic timing and George Fouracres (a comic as well as actor) attacks Dromio of Ephesus’s confounded speeches with virtuosic speed and precision.
The only thing missing is just a little stillness. Some time to sit with Shakespeare’s language. These snatched moments lie almost solely with Paul Rider’s Egeon. As he tremulously describes the shipwreck that “unjustly divorced” his family, the bustle dies down and he brings us all along with him on his torrid and windswept journey.
At Shakespeare’s Globe, London, until 29 July