ALL too often, especially on those play-on-a-plate nights of summertime picnic theatre, Shakespeare's comedies are the victims of heavy-handed excess.

Northern Broadsides' Comedy Of Errors is a breath of fresh air, a Barrie Rutter production with the sun on its back even in the chill of winter and early spring. All the familiar Broadsides energy and crunching northern vowels are retained, but there is a delicious lightness of comic playing and sensitivity to the play being rooted in misfortune as much as a rising tide of misunderstanding.

Giuseppe Belli and Emma Barrington Binns's set is an open space, with a raised centre, screens of blue sky behind, finessed with miniature houses and an abbey that playfully light up to signify a scene's setting.

Costumes are in pastel shades and of Fifties vintage, witty in their matching detail for the tale of two sets of identical twins and multiple mistaken identities.

Conrad Nelson's delightfully brisk, busking jazz opening and even a burst of gospel singing make way for Rutter's melancholic monologue of Egeon's suffering on death row, before the comic confusion begins to weave its serpentine spell.

At its core is the mirror playing of the harassed and baffled double acts that know nothing of each other's existence until the finale. Andrew Cryer's Antipholus of Syracuse and Conor Ryan's Antipholus of Ephesus are uncannily reminiscent of Eric Morecambe, glasses, exasperation and all, while Conrad Nelson and Simon Holland Roberts's ginger-bearded brace of Dromios are a riot as their simian Scouse scally servants.

Rutter has dropped 'The' from the play's title but this is the Comedy Of Errors to see.

Comedy Of Errors, Northern Broadsides, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, 1.30pm today, 7.30pm Saturday, tickets 0113 213 7700; Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, June 6, to 11, 01723 370541, in tandem with Alan Plater's Sweet William.

Updated: 10:31 Thursday, March 24, 2005