The Comedy of Errors – Maltings Theatre, St Albans

Picture: Pavel Goneski

The Comedy of Errors continues at the Maltings Theatre, St Albans as part of the Roman Theatre Open Air Festival.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

Imagine one of Shakespeare’s crazier comedic romps set in a Greek karaoke bar and you have a good vehicle for a funny play with songs.

This is The Comedy of Errors as you’ve probably never seen it before: a lot of fun and inching towards musical theatre as we hop from Sinatra to Queen to Abba to ‘I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside’ and more. The incongruity is part of the joke.

Nothwithstanding the worry of the distressed Egeon (Matthew Parker, who also directs) condemned to death for turning up to search for his lost family, this play is mainly a sit-com about two sets of identical twins separated in infancy and now the victims of a great deal of mistaken identity.

Some of the acting is outstanding. Lewis Jenkins as Antipholus of Syracuse (his first professional acting role) delights with his puzzled bravado and frustration as so much apparent nonsense is spoken to him. It’s an impressively strong performance.

I also admired Phoebe Marshall as Adriana, the wronged, misunderstood feisty wife, and Rosie Edwards as the glad-eyed opportunist, Luciana. And this is a cast of 11 which work slickly and entertainingly together.

It’s a show full of nice touches such as Sam Denia as Dromio of Syracuse muttering “Oh god, there’s two of them” when he sees” Luciana or Gabriel Fogarty-Graveson as Antipholus of Ephesus being arrested and handcuffed with a long chain because of “new government regulations about one metre distance”. And William Donaldson is a very engaging drag queen acting as a quasi narrator and MC in the club.

So far so good. I was less happy about the music in this production. There are a lot of songs many of which aren’t particularly well sung (although Marshall is excellent). If it’s an attempt to sound amateurishly karaoke and a send up then it falls more than a bit flat – literally in some instances. There are, moreover, too many songs. In places they feel bolted on and contrived.

It is a pleasure to see the Maltings Theatre building on its success at the Roman amphitheatre in St Albans last year to create for 2021 a whole open-air festival of which this show is a part. It’s an interesting and versatile space.

Susan Elkin