The Comedy of Errors – Stage@The Dock, Hull

Writer: William Shakespeare

Director: Sean Turner

First of all let us give enormous credit to the energy and enthusiasm of the four young people who make up the company of Three Inch Fools. To fill an enormous space with their antics, playing to a smallish crowd on a miserable afternoon, is no small achievement – and it’s one they will repeat at a huge variety of venues until September. Having said that, the policy of piling one excess on another can become a bit wearing.

The Comedy of Errors, somewhat truncated and not always easy to follow, is bookended by a plot device of having to complete a Shakespeare play before the sand runs through the hour glass. So Peter Long is denied his song (until the very end), Act 4 gets left out and other cuts disappear in a welter of changing characters and mad chasing about.

The plot ofThe Comedy of Errorsis a bit of a mess anyway, all that weird stuff with Dr Pinch, but in brief Egeon arrives in Ephesus, with an amazingly complicated story of losing both his twin sons – confusingly both called Antipholus – and with them their twin servants, both called Dromio. One Antipholus/Dromio pairing lives in Ephesus, it turns out, and the other arrives from Syracuse. Of course they are confused with each other and there’s a fair bit of hoo-hah with Adriana, wife of Antipholus of Ephesus, and a gold chain, ordered by one Antipholus, delivered to the other, until finally everyone ends up at an abbey where the abbess proves to be the wife of Egeon – he’d mislaid her among his other misadventures.

The Stage@The Dock is a wonderfully wide open-air space. The Three Inch Fools set up centrally with one large raised acting area, complete with steps, trapdoor and screen to effect quick changes behind. Two smaller areas occupy the front of the acting area, all three hung with props, musical instruments and noise makers. This area generally proves enough for the Fools, but they make occasional forays into the outer reaches or rampage up through the audience.

To begin with Sean Turner gives us chunks of Egeon’s speech of explanation, delivered at deathly slow old man’s pace by Lucy Chamberlain to the growing exasperation of the troupe, then we’re off, changing character by donning a single representative garment. Stephen Hyde’s pleasant songs are hardly an impediment, with as much running and jumping as elsewhere – and very little standing still! Charlotte Horner reaches an unparallelled level of indignation as Adriana, Lucy Chamberlain twists herself into grotesque shapes as a Dromio, James Aldred projects an air of composure while being as daft as the rest of them and Peter Long keeps trying to sing his song.

The closing stages, with members of the audience dragooned into playing parts, has an inspired lunacy. Till then one could only admire the energy of the performers and their athleticism in playing the whole thing like a 100 metres hurdles race.

On tour nationwide