Sydney Reviews

Proof that Shakespeare can shake up lives and his plays hold a mirror to life, The Twins sees two old school friends come back together forty years after playing the twins in Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, to rework it as a two-hander.

A piece of Theatre Vérité, The Twins is co written and performed by Greg Fleet and Ian Darling, playing themselves in a profound, playful and enduring representation of their friendship.

Formed and forged by their love of drama while students at Geelong Grammar in the 1970’s, Fleet and Darling, caught in thespian thrall, both harboured aspirations of pursuing careers in the theatre. Both earned auditions at NIDA. Darling choked before auditioning in fear of displeasing his businessman father. Fleet was successful only to be expelled for drug use.

Darling went on to become a prominent documentary film maker, Fleet a comedian and heroin enthusiast.Not blood brothers but certainly kindred spirits, their lives intersected, diverged, intersected, and from the latest intersection, a cross roads collision, this play is born.

The Twins echoes its inspirational source, showing that life is indeed a comedy of errors with the hope that things will work out for the best, despite dilemmas, anxieties and erroneous choices. There is a sharing of joys and sorrows, with the anticipation of a happy ending yet with the potential for tragedy on the turn of an unfriendly card.

Daddy issues and life defining labels bestowed by others run a divining line through The Twins, and though some lives look like shipwrecks, the vessel that is true, friendship, buoyed and anchored by honesty and humour, can always be salvaged.

Set in a men’s shed that becomes a writer’s room as the two men thrash out their Comedy of Errors with personal, sometimes painful, sometimes hilarious revelations. From inside the shed, the two shed secrets, lies, misconceptions. Shed light into some dark recesses.

The Twins plays Seymour Centre till April 17.