The Bard and the B-boys

"I've got a debt across the river/ If I don't pay tonight, I'll be chopped liver." Do you recognise these lines? In the original Shakespeare, they read, "I stand debted to this gentleman/ I pray you see him presently discharged." It's quite a leap, but one that the team behind The Bomb-itty of Errors have made with panache. Their hip-hop version of The Comedy of Errors, which started as a university project, has since played off-Broadway, wowed Edinburgh, toured the world and is now about to find out what London thinks of it.

Ever since Baz Luhrmann tapped into Shakespeare's street-wise roots with his gangland film version of Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare, if not exactly cool, has at least been embraced by the MTV generation. What used to put young people off the playwright – namely, the archaic language – is now viewed as a linguistic playground, a pool of ready-made stories just waiting to be experimented with. Arguably, West Side Story got in there first, but the hip-hop scene in particular seems to have taken the Bard to its heart. Bounce star WilPower was breakdancing in A Midsummer Night's Dream before the idea had ever crossed anyone's mind (the unlikeliness of that scenario perhaps inspiring The Donkey Show, a popular Seventies disco version of the same play), and US choreographer Rennie Harris did a B-boy version of R&J called Rome and Jewels which successfully toured the UK in 2001. So The Bomb-itty of Errors is following in something of a tradition.

"It started as a senior project at New York University," the show's director, Andy Goldberg, explains. "These four undergraduates lived hip-hop, but were studying theatre. They wanted to combine those interests and they hit on the idea of adapting Shakespeare." The faculty encouraged them to take it further so the students show-cased it to various backers and directors. One of them was Goldberg, who thought it was "a genius idea" and worked with the four actors and a DJ for a year to develop the piece.

It was at the HBO US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen that it attracted the attention of producer Marshall Cordell. He was there on a skiing holiday, had just sold his business, and was looking for a challenge. So Cordell and independent British producer Martin Sutherland brought the show to Edinburgh last year where it became the party hit of the Fringe. Such is its success, the original cast is too busy working on the movie version to come to London.

But the second cast can't wait to hit the West End. The four of them – plus DJ Kevin Shand, who, having also worked on The Donkey Show, must be the only person in the world to be able to say he's "done Shakespeare twice as a DJ"--play two sets of identical twins plus a host of secondary characters, from bill collectors to street hustlers and of course, women. As Goldberg points out, the show is "true to its roots because men play all the parts."

But what is most exhilarating is the show's verbal dexterity. Joe Hernandez-Kolski, who plays one of the Antipholus brothers, says that "it's magical because everyone has a respect for both Shakespeare and hip-hop." Goldberg thinks Bomb-itty represents what Shakespeare's audience must have felt like going to the theatre, "because it's alive, it's vital, it's funny, it's intelligent, it's doing things with language, so it's actually more Shakespearean than a 'traditional' production which is sort of dead somehow." He feels passionately that "Shakespeare doesn't belong in a classroom on a chalkboard, it belongs in people's mouths." And there is a real synergy between the Bard and the B-boys, he says. "Right now hip-hop is where exciting things are being done with language; they create words and use language as a tool and a play-thing. Hip-hop artists have a real love of language and rhyme and rhythm – they're kindred spirits with Shakespeare."

The show doesn't entirely dispense with the original script. The rappers slip words such as "quoth", "pate" and "wherefore" into the mix, and, when the Hasidic jeweller (aka Shakespeare's merchant) appears, Yiddishisms pop up such as "meshugganah" and "klutz". Ranney, who plays the other Antipholus, points out that the language is even more complex for those in the know. "The hip-hop fans have a lot of smaller treats inside the story. There are certain things that are insider hip-hop jokes, that come and go very fast."

The music is inspired by late Eighties hip-hoppers such as De la Soul, the Beastie Boys and Run DMC because, says Goldberg, "they used a lot of narrative and a lot of humour." For Shand, who mixes it live on stage, the music is "elemental, stripped down" hip-hop – that is, the beats are simple enough for everyone to latch onto.

What really makes the show work is that instead of looking at Shakespeare as a foreign language or a text to be studied, these performers see it as something they can inhabit and become. As Hernandez-Kolski puts it, "hip-hop is like home to me. It's positive, it's empowering." The plan is to make audiences feel the same way about Shakespeare.

'The Bomb-itty of Errors': New Ambassadors, London WC2 (020 7369 1761), previewing, opens Wed, to 12 July