...Antipholuses and Dromios display the kind of comic timing you associate with Swiss watches...Masson and Slinger are gloriously vulgar, defensive and clownish...this is a joyous, life-affirming production.'
SUNDAY TIMES
'Nancy Meckler's glorious new revival for the RSC...ensemble playing that's blissfully endowed with madcap energy...the crucial bouts of inspired silliness are here by the dozen...there's much satisfying supporting tomfoolery from Oscar Pearce as the baffled jeweller Angelo and Tom Hodgkins as quackish Doctor Pinch, while Suzanne Burden injects a few needle-sharp moments of pain and perplexity as the trapped Ephesan housewife Adriana.'
DAILY TELEGRAPH
'Super show...the greatest fun...Nancy Meckler's direction, with its absurdist costumes and jaunty musical touches, achieves just the right note of fantasy...the two Antipholus twins (Christopher Colquhoun and Joe Dixon)...give subtly balanced performances...Adriana, as played by sassy Suzanne Burden, is a classy crumple of female complexes.'
DAILY MAIL
'During Nancy Meckler's production of The Comedy of Errors, you start to wonder if the RSC somehow tricked you into following a white rabbit down a burrow...the Royal Shakespeare Theatre is less auditorium and more Wonderland, a riot of cod-Victorian colour that beautifully sets the scene for Shakespeare's cabinet of comic curiosities...its carnival atmosphere is hard to resist...the auditorium rings with spontaneous guffaws and bursts of applause, the reward for inventive slapstick, comic precision and the timeless joy of watching people confounded by the unpredictability of life...both Antipholuses and Dromios display the kind of comic timing you associate with Swiss watches...Masson and Slinger are gloriously vulgar, defensive and clownish...this is a joyous, life-affirming production.'
SUNDAY TIMES
'There's an illuminating wit at work here: for the first time in my experience, this play seems absolutely the work of the man who wrote the sonnets...Joe Dixon makes Antipholus of Syracuse into the play's poet...he is the plays visionary, its beating heart...as the Syracusian Dromio, Jonathan Slinger - effortlessly funny in his various bemusements - is just as brilliant.'
FINANCIAL TIMES
'Proof, if proof were needed that comedy can sound profounder depths than tragedy...designer Katrina Lindsay's costumes suggest Alice in Wonderland washed onto a Shockheaded Peter shore...even the cameos are colourful…Christopher Obi's merchant is an excitable, cleaver wielding African; Tom Hodgkin's Doctor Pinch a fabulous quack…the risk with such a carnivalesque affair is that it becomes too broad, too tomfoolish, but Meckler's production never loses contact with the very human bewilderment that swirls in the play's atmosphere like sea-spray.'
OBSERVER
