Identical (Nottingham Playhouse)
Rating:
Verdict: A sweet treat
Two ten-year-old, lonely only children at summer camp come up against their mirror image.
'That girl's got a nerve, turning up with your face,' says a trouble-making chum.
Spiteful plait-pulling turns into tearful hugs with the miraculous discovery that they are in fact twins: a secret buried by their divorced parents.

Cue 'You're my sister… oh, how beautiful that sounds', as catchy as it is touching.




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The musical version returns to the 1950s world of the original, German-set, 1942 novel, Lottie And Lisa by Erich Kastner, and to the idea of seeing double — for real — as only theatre can. Which makes it twice as much fun 

Identical begins with a dream coming true, and — when this plucky pair swap lives to meet the parent they never knew — culminates in a fairy-tale ending: the divided family reunited.
Tricksy filming made a star of Hayley Mills, uakino who played both sisters in Disney's 1961 film The Parent Trap, and another of Lindsay Lohan in the 1998 remake.
The musical version returns to the 1950s world of the original, German-set, 1942 novel, Lottie And Lisa by Erich Kastner, and to the idea of seeing double — for real — as only theatre can. Which makes it twice as much fun.
Director Trevor Nunn, former RSC supremo, well-versed with Shakespeare's tragicomedies of errors involving the muddles, miseries and merriment of mistaken identities, impressively brings out both the farce and the fragility of this complicated family situation in which people who belong together have been painfully pulled apart.