Fresh new take on Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors opens in Scarborough

Robinson is in the director’s seat for the upcoming production. “We can’t wait to get started on this hilarious and anarchic new version of Shakespeare’s craziest show, full of mistaken identity and non-stop twists and turns,” he says. “We’re loving working with the brilliant new Shakespeare North Playhouse and our writers Elizabeth Godber and Nick Lane have paid tribute to the two venues by creating characters from the two towns and setting the show in Scarborough in the vibrant, neon-lit 1980s.”

Lane and Godber, more of whom in a moment, have clearly used Shakespeare’s tale as a basis, but have definitely ‘messed around’ with it. The story tells of two rival states, two sets of mismatched twins and one ‘nutty day at the seaside.

An actor from Lancashire arrives in a Yorkshire coastal town to perform his ‘magnificent’ one-man show, we’re told. The problem is that there’s no audience because everyone in the town has booked for a talent show across town starring the twin brother he’s never met. The twin owes money all over the town, has promised his wife a gold chain and is banking on winning the talent show to avoid getting into trouble with some unsavoury characters.

Lane is the writer and actor who was taken under the wing of John Godber while Elizabeth Godber is the daughter of John and Jane Thornton. “I’ve known Liz’s mum and dad since I was a kid – I worked with Jane when I was around 12 on a play for a theatre company called DAC about mining. We toured around working men’s clubs and miners’ socials and welfares, then I met Liz’s dad when I auditioned for Oliver Twist at Hull Truck in 1987, when I was 17. I thought I’d done terribly, but we had a good laugh and got on and I became a friend and worked at Hull Truck a lot.”

Godber was comfortable, she says, working with Lane on the script: “It’s felt very normal because I’ve known Nick all my life – it’s just like working with my family, which obviously I’m very used to.”

Godber junior has been building her theatre credits as a writer and performer in recent years, while Lane has firmly cornered the Scarborough market in Christmas shows for young kids with his irreverent, amusing takes on classic stories.

“Paul Robinson said he was really interested in co-commissioning with the new Shakespeare North Playhouse a piece that would make Shakespeare more approachable,” says Lane. “He said he’d love to work with me, but he’d also like to work with a talented writer earlier in their career. When I said Liz, he said ‘oh that’s brilliant because I was thinking of her too.’”

It’s all very well to suggest that two writers can work together, but there was a third writer in the mix here, namely Shakespeare.

“We met up a few times to talk about rough ideas about how to make it work from two different voices – Shakespeare’s and our collective voice and then divvied up the scenes, essentially. Liz, who’s much more intelligent than me said ‘well, why don’t I take those scenes because they’re led by the female characters and you take those’.”

“We got rid of pretty much all of the misogynistic stuff early on,” says Godber. “I think one of the biggest changes for people who know the original is that the two women, Luciana and Adriana are very different. Luciana is completely different – in the Shakespeare original she’s very meek and mild. She does a big speech about subservience and that’s been cut because I was like ‘we’re not having that’.” Audiences might notice several other radical changes, not least of which is the introduction of the Roses rivalry.

Stephen Joseph Theatre to April 15.