Reader Reviews
The Comedy of Errors - What Country Friends is This? (Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon)
Back to Show Details| Score | Comment | Date |
 | I thought this was a great production. So good, in fact, that I went to see it twice, and took my two teenaged children the second time. They thoroughly enjoyed it too, it made Shakespeare exciting and accessible for them. It was funny, it was dark, and it was extremely moving at the end. - MelO | 30 Sep 12 |
| I could not disagree more with some of the comments here. This was a rollicking performance with clever staging and excellent acting. I found it genuinely entertaining! - Katy Dunn | 03 Aug 12 |
| This was a very disappointing production. The acting was mediocre, lines were difficult to hear, delivered at a pace which was difficult to follow. I have been going to Stratford since 1947 as my sister used to act here and her husband was a designer and it was the most disappointing production I have ever seen there. The amount of brutality was not in keeping with the elements of comedy this play normally produces. It was a thoroughly miserable evenings entertainment. - Carol Liggins | 22 Jul 12 |
| As a former drama director, I found this to be a very disappointing production. I waited 50 years to see " the real thing" ! It was too dark for a comedy, and the actors were very difficult to understand. The set and lighting were very creative. What a shame that the rest of the elements were not as well done. It is certainly acceptable to change the time period of the plays,but torture, executions, and violent soldiers seem to be a bit much in this interpretation. - Sheri Brodrick | 17 Jul 12 |
| I found this rather dark interpretation very convincing - and very Elizabethan: surely truer to the spirit of the sixteenth century than the usual flat, bright, merely slapstick version. Recommend seeing it in combination with the Duchess of Malfi, as I did, for a real immersion in a world much more visceral and morally ambiguous than we like to tolerate nowadays. I agree with the criticisms of the pacing. The rapid-fire delivery of the lines pushes the pace of the action effectively, but it lacks aesthetic appeal, and in some cases the lines are actually unintelligible. Nevertheless, I found the performance vastly satisfying - richly comic with disturbing undercurrents. - M. Buchmann | 07 Jun 12 |
| Disappointing experience. The sight of "waterboarding", electric shock torture and prisoners being strung up sits very uneasily with one of Shakespeares brightest comedies. The acting was not brilliant either. The two Dromios apart, I thought some of the the acting lacked conviction,with lines being delivered at such a pace as to make them unintelligible at times ;much preferred the BBC version with Roger Daltrey and Michael Kitchen. ps: perhaps I was not in the best frame of mind, seated behind one of those adorable iron girder pillars in Stratford's hugely expensive theatre - Anthony Atkinson | 16 May 12 |
