The legacy of two famous and brilliant Stratford productions of The Comedy of Errors weighs heavily upon any new attempt. Clifford Williams's 1962 production, still being revived ten years later, was one of the most acclaimed RSC productions ever. Trevor Nunn's musical extravaganza of 1976 (Judi Dench, Michael Williams, Roger Rees, Francesca Annis, et al), also filmed for television, was another great success. And, if one cares to go further back in Stratford annals, there was Komisarjevsky's classic of 1938. As the standing ovation continued on first preview night of the current production, an usherette was heard to express relief on behalf of the company: "They were so worried. They've been living in the shadow of the last [1976] one."

No need to have worried. This production has a distinct identity of its own, is overflowing with ideas and energy, and will live in the memory alongside its illustrious predecessors. It will probably be either loved or loathed, for there are no half-measures about it. It is, unashamedly, a show. One recognizes its debts to past productions, a gesture here, a bit of business there, the now-standard musical setting of Dr Pinch's incantation number. But Adrian Noble's enchanted Ephesus is a circus world, a child's story-book land. Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Pierrot, Coco the clown, Charlie Chaplin, a bobby on a bike, citizens in blackface and whiteface, bowler hats and moustaches (and grey business suits), a duke in purple-and-ermine robe and crown (over a grey business suit and college tie), a saffron-faced Dr Pinch in tails and mortar-board—St Paul's Ephesus, with its exorcists and practitioners of curious arts, was a drab seaside village to this.

A bare, white semi-circular shell, three storeys high, is the set. A pit orchestra (plaudits to the percussionist-cum-special effects man) occupies a real pit, surrounded by playing area on four sides, and on one occasion, several characters sit with their feet dangling down onto the piano keyboard, producing random chords; on another, in the midst of a chase, Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse, hemmed in on both sides, leap across the abyss. Music has become, in recent years, an outstanding feature of RSC productions. One recalls, for example, Terry Hands's As You Like It and Much Ado and Trevor Nunn's All's Well in that regard. This Comedy of Errors is no exception. The five-piece pit orchestra works overtime (even more so on 15 September when, technical problems having postponed the curtain for more than an hour, they cheerfully entertained the equally cheerful audience). Ragtime, jazz, circus tunes and schmaltz set the rapidly-changing moods. Before the performance, during the interval—there is one, despite the programme's bold-faced declaration to the contrary—a foyer combo plays, and then, in what is becoming a RSC signature, joins the cast onstage for the finale.

The Dromios are clowns, with Emmett Kelly faces including red plastic noses which beep (via the percussionist) when pinched, and which must seriously impede respiration. They wear baggy plaid suits with matching caps, the slightly different colours of the plaids being the only variation. Richard O'Callaghan's Dromio of Syracuse is an immensely energetic, nervous character, obsessed with witches and demons. In his increasing bewilderment and incomprehension at being beaten for doing just what his master tells him to do, he breaks down in tears, moving the entire audience to sympathetic sighs. Henry Goodman, brilliant as the hoofer and wouldbe comic Harry in The Time of Your Life (a role created by Gene Kelly) at The Other Place, plays a more lugubrious Dromio of Ephesus, breaking mechanically into a dance step under the conjuring of Pinch. For both these Dromios, the gratuitously vulgar farting duel through the letter slot in the portable door, in the otherwise extremely funny Act III, scene 1, seems slightly ill-conceived.

The Antipholuses are identified as twins by their bright blue faces, the subject of much speculation in post-performance discussions. Perhaps the clue is Antipholus of Syracuse's line I to the world am like a drop of water in 1.2, or the dominant sea and water imagery in general. It may be a generic trait: Egeon has a blue nose. With their identical grey suits and white gloves and shoes, it establishes twinship in two actors, Paul Greenwood and Peter McEnery, who bear less natural resemblance than, say, Roger Rees and Mike Gwilym, their predecessors in the 1976 production. These two convey quite clearly the differences in temperament of the twins. Peter McEnery is particularly fine as Antipholus of Ephesus, revealing a comic talent unsuspected perhaps by RST habitués who may have seen him in such roles as Pericles, Suffolk (Henry VI), Albie Sachs, or Brutus in this season's Julius Caesar.

Luciana (Jane Booker) is pale yellow (golden), wears a pink ruffled clown outfit, and an extraordinary blond hairdo, spiralling up to a point some fifteen inches above her head. Unicorn? Ice cream cone? Or seashell? Adriana (Zoë Wanamaker) wears a rather dowdy suit over shocking pink arms, hands and legs. Miss Wanamaker, who may have been influenced by Judi Dench's Adriana of 1976, has, like Miss Dench, the ability to vary the timbre of her voice, and she uses it to considerable effect here. The genuine anguish felt by Adriana, admittedly muted by the dominant comic-farcical mood of the inner play, is glimpsed. Ought we to be told and retold so emphatically that something more than a diner intime has transpired between Adriana and the wrong Antipholus? Shakespeare certainly does not do so. Emma Watson's Courtezan, who rises from a trap pat upon Antipholus's cue, Some blessed power deliver us from hence!, is attired in bright red leotard with her face made up to the same hue, black stockings and wig, and a very tight white corset with garters—Mistress Satan in the flesh.

I have dwelt upon costumes at some length because, in the absence of any set to speak of, they carry the sole visual dimension of the production. This is a fantasy world in which both the Roman comic farce of twin masters and servants and the errors that ensue from their all being in the same place, and the mouldy old romance tale of hapless Egeon and his long-lost family, are enacted and eventually converge. The director's and designer's conception is fine. The execution frequently goes joyfully and heedlessly over the top. There is simply too much going on. Gimmickry rules. A lift, the sort used for washing sky-scraper windows and in which Adriana and Luciana make their first entrance, broke down, and the actors concerned, deprived of this eye-catching device, had to fall back on old-fashioned acting. Very well, we may say, and a good thing too. But not when they were not prepared for it, when the production was geared to one spectacular moment after another. If any of Shakespeare's plays invite such extravagance (and if in any it is more pardonable than in others), it is those in which farce and slapstick-style humour are inherent to a preponderant degree. The Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the Shrew (which have more than that in common) are the two chief examples of Shakespeare in the farcical vein, but neither is pure farce throughout. From the beginning of his career, Shakespeare delighted in yoking together (sometimes violently) diverse literary and dramatic kinds, the result, for better or worse, being uniquely his. Adrian Noble's production does attempt to distinguish the scenes of wonder, romance, pathos and lyricism from the farce. When Antipholus of Syracuse, victim of the first 'error', mistaking the local Dromio for his twin, recollects the reputation of Ephesus for sorcery, cozenage and many suchlike liberties of sin (I. 2) the white light fades to blue and eerie music is heard. When Adriana mourns her husband's apparent infidelity (II. 1), a slow, sad melody, the sort that soap operas employ at such moments, is heard. The wooing of Luciana is accompanied by saccharine mood music, as Antipholus hangs upside down (his world becoming more and more that way) from a window, speaking quatrains to Luciana who stands on a ladder that she has carried on and erected to a toy doll's ballet routine.

At the end, the now statutory RSC all-in dance number concludes with the unrolling of an immense tablecloth from under the Abbess's voluminous blue habit. It is stretched the entire width of the forestage and the company lines up behind it as if for the 'gossips' feast'. After so long grief, such nativity—the rebirth and reunion are celebrated to suitably exuberant music.

But despite the laudable attempt to preserve those variegated strands of wonder, mystery, weirdness, romance, lyricism that make the piece, not a novice's servile imitation of Plautus, but an unmistakably Shakespearian comic romance, they are simply overwhelmed by the nonstop barrage of gimmickry, buffoonery, vaudeville gags and Keystone Cops high jinks. But if in the theatre, as opposed to the Eng. Lit. classroom, sheer theatricality, clarity of speech, boundless energy and wholehearted commitment from all performers count for anything, this is an unforgettable show.