The Wars of the Roses are back. Trade between Lancashire and Yorkshire comes at a punishing price. Regional loyalty is high. Make the wrong choice between an eccles cake and some parkin and you could meet a sorry end. For no compelling reason, it is also the 1980s, but best not to ask too many questions of this larky Shakespeare rewrite – it is hardly as if the playwright took his comedy too seriously.
Taking its cue from Isobel McArthur’s Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of), which gave an irreverent pop-culture spin to Jane Austen, this version of Shakespeare’s early comedy of confusion mixes in modern language and hit songs to play to the spirit if not to the letter of the original. As director Paul Robinson says in his programme note, “English is the only language that you can’t translate Shakespeare into,” which means it takes guts – or at least a degree of cheek – to set this 400-year-old play in the language of today.
Writers Elizabeth Godber and Nick Lane show no inhibitions. They slip in and out of Elizabethan English without fear, getting the seven actors to stop and update us on the story of the estranged identical twins and their similarly lost twin servants – or to round off a scene with a blast of Feargal Sharkey’s A Good Heart or Madonna’s Material Girl.
The setting is Scarborough, where the production transfers after its run in Prescot and where, in the play, excitement is building for the annual Search for a Star-borough talent show. It just so happens that Antipholus of Scarborough was a child actor earning small-town fame from an ice-cream advert while Antipholus of Prescot is a university-educated actor on tour with a one-man show.
The talent show makes their reunion all the more inevitable. David Kirkbride plays one with an end-of-the-pier swagger and the other with a middle-class preciousness. As the two Dromios, Oliver Mawdsley brings different degrees of bewilderment.
They lead a happy ensemble through Robinson’s spirited in-the-round production with its cartoonish sense of fun. The songs add to the variety, but also to the length, stretching what should be a brisk comedy to the point where its one central joke wears thin. Still, there are plenty of laughs along the way.
• At Shakespeare North Playhouse, Prescot, until 25 March. Then at Stephen Joseph theatre, Scarborough, 30 March–15 April.
