THEATRE / Make no mistake: Paul Taylor on Oxford Stage Company's productions of Comedy of Errors and Pericles

Height of profile and depth of quality are by no means necessarily connected in the arts world. The English Shakespeare Company, for example, makes a regular habit of subjecting Shakespeare's plays to a clapped-out, condescendingly populist aesthetic, yet its broad reputation goes miraculously unscathed. Meanwhile, a smaller-scale touring outfit like the Oxford Stage Company under the direction of John Retallack goes largely unsung in the media despite treating its audiences each summer to a level of Shakespeare production that, for theatrical vitality, warmth of spirit and interpretative penetration, has precious little to learn from the big shot Bardic organisations, and that includes the RSC.

This summer they are touring two plays in rep, Comedy of Errors and Pericles. They make a good pairing since the Plautine farce of the former, early piece is framed by a serious Romance story involving a family, sundered by shipwreck, who are reunited and symbolically reborn years later. In this regard, it looks forward to the Late Plays, of which Pericles is the first.

Accordingly, Karl James' lovely music ensures that, at appropriate moments, a mood of Romance-like wonder punctuates the spirited knockabout of Errors - a reflective flamenco the equivalent there of the faraway, mournful marvelling of the pipes which underscore the intimations of the miraculous Pericles. Julian McGowan's single set also helps bind the plays - his eerie colonnade providing a strikingly primitive surround for the mythic journeying in the later play while also suggesting an arcade of rather dubious shops and houses in the witchy, pagan Ephesus that is the setting of Errors.

Retallack's staging of the wanderings and the trials at sea in Pericles has a haunting economy. Held by the actors and swayed back and forth, two crossed staves for the prow and an upright one for the mast are a powerful shorthand for the hero's various storm-tossed vessels, with the elements conjured up by the crashing of a dangling cymbal. Suddenly switched into parallel lines, these staves can become the raft on which the prone Pericles bobs to safety, or, arranged into spokes, the wheel of the ship on which, in a raging tempest, his baby daughter is born and his wife, apparently, dies. This latter's burial at sea is here beautifully visualised in a non-naturalistic mime which shows her floating with billowed-out cloak to the bottom where, in line with the production's strong emphasis on the benign superintending of events by the Goddess Diana, she is joined by veiled votaresses who have her wellbeing at heart.

In the play's first episode, Pericles is confronted by the horror of father- daughter incest, presented to him in the wrapped-up form of a riddle. By some pointed doubling, Retallack's thoughtful production alerts you to the way each of his subsequent ports of call throws up strange distorted images of this intitial encounter with evil. The threat of incest hovers in an obscure, dream-like way over the action and is only decisively transcended in the wonderful recognition scene between Pericles and his daughter Marina. Philip Bowen and Catherine Prendergast play it with a fine feel for its painful / joyous rhythm and there's an acute directorial touch: when the young woman sings to try to draw this (as yet) strange old man out of his depression, her song here is in the form of a riddle whose answer is the sea. She thus recalls the first incest-blighted episode even as she annuls it.

It's odd that in Errors, everyone in Ephesus is in black Elizabethan gear as though in mass mourning, but even this fails to dampen the production's spirits. There's excellent clowning from Antony Howes and Clive Duncan as the twin servants, a performance of real comic charm by Grant Parsons as the Syracusan Antipholus, while Susan Colverd, a tank in a frock, is a hilariously indignant bruiser as Adrianna, her greedy-for-double-helpings eye-roll when the twins meet and she thinks she has two husbands is itself worth the price of a ticket.