Andy Miller

… and The Comedy of Errors

A spirited retelling of The Comedy of Errors has Shakespeare reborn as twin clones in a run-down seaside resort

The phrase ‘Shakespeare comedy’ is an oxymoron with a long pedigree, one which perhaps stretches back to the late 16th century; and a running joke in Ben Elton’s Upstart Crow is that no one finds the comedies funny except their author, who thinks they’re hilarious. So it is a brave writer who, in a bid for laughs, bases a Shakespeare comedy on a Shakespeare comedy — in this case The Comedy of Errors. Fortunately, Marie Phillips has the wit, and sufficient wisdom, to pull it off.

In Oh I Do Like to Be… Shakespeare is reborn in a grotty English seaside resort, not once but twice. Billy and Bill are not merely twins but clones, some Shakespearean DNA having been covertly extracted from the late playwright’s teeth — Phillips is not overly concerned with historical or scientific verisimilitude. Neither twin knows of the existence of the other. With him/them is his/their sister Sally/Sal, cloned from a hair found on the back of a bus seat. Billy is a would-be playwright (‘If Shakespeare can make up words, he thought, so can I.’). Bill is married to Thandie but is having an affair with Anthony, a traffic warden who, as the story begins, is giving a parking ticket to rogue scientist Eleanor, the twins’ ‘mother’, though almost no one is aware of this fact. As a restaging of Shakespeare in modern dress, Peter Brook it ain’t.

Phillips’s first novel, Gods Behaving Badly, imagined the deities of Greek myth washed up in 21st-century London and was a surprise international bestseller; her second, The Table of Less Valued Knights, was longlisted for the 2015 Baileys Prize for Fiction.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in