Pop-up Globe, The Entertainment Quarter, Sydney
September 8, 2018

The Pop-up Globe opened its Sydney season in highly entertaining fashion with a rollicking production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, complete with Maori-speaking fairies. Now the company has popped up another Shakespearean comedy, The Comedy of Errors.

The Comedy of Errors. Photographs supplied

If Dream ventured on the broad side of subtle, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The Comedy of Errors takes pantomime and slapstick as its cue, and throws everything into the mix from a custard pie in the face, to the most obvious sexual innuendos, to ad libs like, “Is this a tatty I see before me?” along with pantomime refrains of “He IS a bailiff!” It’s broad, it’s brash and unapologetically crass at times with plenty of ridiculous, energetic buffoonery. It won’t be to everyone’s taste, though the “groundlings” seemed to enjoy it, even if there wasn’t the same amount of spontaneous feel-good interaction between stage and audience as with the Dream.

One of Shakespeare’s early, most farcical comedies, The Comedy of Errors is set during a madcap night in exotic Ephesus, where any Syracusian arriving without permission is duly executed. The Pop-up Globe production begins with...