seasoned stories warm the heart

reviewed the COMEDY OF ERRORS

ROYAL LYCEUM edinburgh A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

CITIZENS, GLASGOW

BOTH UNTIL NOVEMBER 17 "A SAD tale's best for winter," as Shakespeare noted in his moderately miserable late-period comedy The Winter's Tale. This season, two of Scotland's main theatres eschew autumnal solemnity for lighter comedies from his early and middle periods - though each does feature a character under threat of death.

Little is made of this bleak undercurrent in Tony Cownie's production of The Comedy Of Errors. Now an associate director at the Lyceum, Cownie has directed some of the theatre's finest work of late. He pitches this play as a jolly, crowd-pleasing romp, bursting at the seams with smartly mounted set-pieces. This is probably the wisest approach given the subtleties on offer. Shakespeare's first comedy is a schematic if gracefully written proto-farce of multiple mistaken identity, and its themes are as shallow as its plot is implausible.

Setting the play in a tongue-in-cheek 16th-century Edinburgh - complete with Fringe performer and Festival fireworks - allows for some boisterous larks with live music and period costumes. But where this production really scores is in the comic interaction between the exasperated central characters. There are plenty of bold, energetic performances, though, and not just among the principals - Jimmy Chisholm's comic verve as Antipholus of Syracuse is great fun.

At the Citizens, meanwhile, director Giles Havergal takes a no- nonsense, iconoclastic approach from the moment the show begins with the title daubed like a slogan on the curtain. Sure enough, it's a production that swiftly identifies the magic of A Midsummer Night's Dream as a metaphor for the vagaries of human desire. Havergal casts a spell using that most theatrical of potions - simple imagination. He fashions a forest from a cluster of wooden chairs, and a fairy bower of a pile of duvets.

This is not a flawless interpretation. There is a tendency among some of the cast to telegraph their characters' intentions rather than simply enact them, as well as some trite, ill-executed symbolism involving a walking-stick. But there are several first-rate performances - Greg Powrie's blandly imperious Theseus/Oberon, Derwent Watson's fawning Quince and Ian Skewis's soft-spoken Lysander. And the limelight is repeatedly stolen by John Kazek's gloriously brash Bottom and, best of all, Malcolm Shields's mercurially nimble Puck.

And it's here, in the mischief and sleight of hand, that even the Lyceum's flamboyant costumes are revealed as no match for sheer skill and inventiveness.

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