AN outdoor Shakespeare performance takes place in the Lake District next week.

The Illyria theatre company will be back at Brantwood, near Coniston, to perform A Comedy of Errors - with a Mexican twist - on Tuesday July 25.

In the bard’s shortest, funniest and most rumbustious comedy, two sets of identical twins, separated at birth, unknowingly end up in the same city, and through a series of chance meetings their lives and sanity begin to unravel.

More and more people are sucked into a vortex of mistaken identity including an Officer who is paid per arrest, a Goldsmith who hasn't been paid at all, a delayed Merchant, an irate Courtesan and a mad Exorcist.

To cap it all, this year Illyria’s Shakespeare production is re-located to the town of Ephesus, in Mexico, and is performed by a five-piece Mariachi band, resplendent in ponchos and sombreros.

Brantwood’s annual outdoor theatre shows take place in the scenic lakeside meadow overlooking Coniston Water and the fells, providing a spectacular back-drop for Illyria’s stage.

Illyria has a deservedly unparalleled reputation for the clarity and authenticity of its Shakespearean style, performing each play in the open-air with only a handful of props and no scenery - as almost all of Shakespeare's plays were originally conceived.

They achieve the seemingly impossible by performing the plays uncut with five actors, the number it is believed Shakespeare’s own company used when touring the provinces.

The productions are slick, physical and imaginative in execution, and are played with characteristic briskness. Each is inspired by performance techniques of Elizabethan touring troupes such as live music and song, an inclusion of the audience in the proceedings, contemporary references and a robustness of style.

Theatre tickets are available from Brantwood, or online at www.illyria.uk.com

Gates open at 6pm and the performances start at 7pm. Visitors are asked to take their own seating or rug and a picnic, and performances will go ahead regardless of the weather.