When this impressive, wooden replica of a 16th-century royal theatre opened 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”. So it is. So, also, is this latest comedy produced on – and around – its “wooden O” of a stage.
Writers Elizabeth Godber and Nick Lane have, in the words of the programme, “messed around with” Shakespeare. The bard’s two sets of separated identical twins are no longer from Syracuse and Ephesus but from two warring towns distinguished by their baking (eccles cakes v parkin) and their accents: Prescot v Scarborough (this is a co-production with the latter’s Stephen Joseph theatre). Deftly delivered lines slip easily between contemporary speech and Elizabethan English, elisions made seamless, more or less, by Lane’s modern versification (the goldsmith Angelo fears “suppliers [who]/ Extract late payment with pliers”).
