Now The Comedy of Errors  isn’t the finest of Shakespeare’s canon and it is certainly the weakest of those that are comedies but if like the RSC you are going to produce all of Shakespeare’s plays, it has to be included.  I keep thinking I am a completist, that I have seen them all but then a new play emerges which might have had a few verses penned by Shakespeare. Then that has to be added to the list as well as 1727’s Double Falsehood which might be based on Shakespeare’s lost play Cardenio written with John Fletcher. 

The Roman playwright Plautus favoured twin themes with their potential for mistaken identity and comic misunderstanding.  The vein of Comedy of Errors is one of shipwrecks and twins.  Can you name two other of Shakespeare’s plays with a ship wreck and a set of twins? 

Answers:The Tempest  has a shipwreck but no twins but a father separated from his son and neither knowing if his relative is alive.   Twelfth Night has both a shipwreck and twins Viola and Sebastian separated at sea.  

Our televisions are joining up Long Lost Families, those separated for tens of years with maybe unrealistic expectations of what reunion will bring.  All this is made easier with the resources of the internet.  In recent years even those abandoned at birth as babies, the foundlings  have been able to trace their genetic families using DNA databases.

The play opens in Ephesus where Egeon (Antony Bunsee) a merchant of Syracuse is seeking his long lost son but it is illegal for Syracusians to set foot in Ephesus and Egeon is arrested and sentenced to be beheaded.  Solinus the Duke (Nicholas Prasad) commutes the sentence until sunset.

Meanwhile the two sons both called Antipholus, one who lives in Ephesus (Rowan Polonski) and the other from Syracuse (Guy Lewis) cross paths in Ephesus with their twin servants the Dromios from Syracuse (Jonathan Broadbent) and from Ephesus (Greg Haiste).  Money and jewellery change hands in a twins mixup.  The Errors of the title are not mistakes but wanderings.