[In the following excerpted review, Carnegy admires director Lynne Parker's farcical staging of The Comedy of Errors with the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Memorial Theatre in 2000 and praises individual performances in the production.]

The Comedy of Errors is not, I imagine, a text that anyone other than a Gradgrind finds himself re-reading for pleasure. On the stage, it's another matter. It's a play that can explode into life when taken to town in the right way, and that's exactly what happens with the hilariously invigorating show in the Memorial Theatre. The director, making her RSC debut, is Lynne Parker. She's given the company an irresistible hit. Parker's conceit is indebted to screwball Hollywood comedy, reminding you that the play was once a 1940s musical called The Boys from Syracuse.

The milieu for The Comedy is Mediterranean Mafia-land, call it Palermo, Ephesus or where you will, with the Duke as a pin-striped, triby-sporting Dook. In its pace and timing the production is more farce than comedy, yet the dark strand of Egeon, father to the Antipholus twins, being under sentence of death is not sold short. The visiting Syracusan partnership of David Tennant's Antipholus and Ian Hughes's Dromio is a faultless double-act of an loose-limbed playboy and a quick-wined gentleman's gentleman who can spring a picnic and a pair of stools from a suitcase in the twinkling of an eye. As unlooked-for mistresses, gold chains and the odd fish accrue about his person, Tennant's face is a sight for sore eyes. His repartee with Hughes reaches its hysterical climax when he quizzes his man about the geography of the latter's would-be seductress, a greasy scullion, ‘spherical, like a globe’, and it deservedly brought the house down.

The Ephesus home pair of Anthony Howell's Antipholus and Tom Smith's Dromio have a lower profile in the play, but Smith puts himself across as a Fawlty Towers Manuel even more flummoxed than Andrew Sachs. Emily Raymond plays Adriana as an excitable wronged wife, with Jacqueline Defferary as her bemused sister, Luciana.

This is a hugely enjoyable show in which almost anything can and does happen. As a magnificent madcap chase gathers momentum I could have sworn that a knight in armour from Henry IV joined in, closely followed by a bright-yellow pantomime camel in hot pursuit of Desmond Barrit as Falstaff. Maybe Barrit, who once won an Olivier award for his playing both Antipholi, just couldn't stay away. It was that kind of evening. Go for yourself and see whether I was dreaming.