Finding Comedy Amid the Carnage ""The Ladykillers"" at the Gielgud Theatre is a remake of the classic Ealing Studios comedy. LONDON - Comedy, you might think, should occupy an altogether separate realm from death or the infernal or whatever you want to describe as the antithesis to the life that laughter by its very nature confers. Simon Kane Fiona Glascott as Estelle in "Huis Clos" by Jean-Paul Sartre at the Trafalgar Studio 2. But that would mean failing to reckon with several recent London openings in which any jolliness on view moves very much toward murder or darkness - or everlasting hell. Indeed, on opening night of the National Theatre's new revival of "The Comedy of Errors," I could sense playgoers wondering whether they had stumbled into the wrong auditorium during the glum-faced 15 minutes or so before Shakespeare's knockabout tale of twinning and mistaken identity begins to take the hold promised by its title; the production, directed by the Royal Court's artistic director, Dominic Cooke, here making his National debut, runs in repertory in the Olivier through April 1. The Bard must himself bear some of the brunt for this misapprehension, which is amplified in Mr. Cooke's staging by the gravitas with which the play's doomy back story is laid out for us at the start. After all, "griefs unspeakable" hardly sounds the stuff of mirth, and it isn't until we leave Egeon (Joseph Mydell) and his opening narrative of woe and move on to the perambulations of the two Dromios and Antipholuses that the play finds its comic footing. With, one might add, the help of the inevitable fart joke without which most British humor, it would seem, is incomplete; it was ever thus. The occasion of the production has been the casting of the noted British funnyman Lenny Henry as Antipholus of Syracuse in what is the sophomore outing for this outsized talent after his much-lauded Othello on the West End in 2009. Amid a variable cast, Mr. Henry scores again here, his open-faced quality well-suited to a picaresque story that lands its itinerant characters on the shores of the wonder that comes with gaining a sense of self. "After so much grief," we're told in no uncertain terms, "such nativity." A play about the mishap-prone coming together of people who have either been rent asunder or (worse) thought dead, this "Comedy of Errors" tilts in the direction of such late-Shakespearean romances as "The Winter's Tale," allowing us to glimpse in the Bard's theatrical infancy the seeds of themes to which he would return. On that topic, if Mr. Henry is looking for a third Shakespearean role in due course, might I suggest that later play's jealous yet ultimately remorseful figure, Leontes? In the meantime, a celebrated stand-up's serious regard for the classical canon is on view once again to admire - and applaud. Cheers, too, to Peter Capaldi, the frequent celluloid presence whose return to the stage in "The Ladykillers" in a stroke justifies a fitfully entertaining adaptation from Graham Linehan of the much-loved 1955 English film. The track record of movies repositioned for the theater hasn't been great, especially once one looks beyond those that were successfully adapted as stage musicals ("Hairspray," to name one) and recalls instead the likes of "Rain Man" or "When Harry Met Sally," to cite just two West End entries of scant import. "The Ladykillers" has the advantage of reviving an Ealing Studios cinema classic on English ground, and when the momentum of the director Sean Foley's staging begins to pall, Michael Taylor's dizzyingly angled set can pick up the slack. Inheriting Alec Guinness's screen role as the mastermind of a quintet of malefactors who take up residency in a soft-spoken elderly lady's self-evidently vertiginous home, Mr. Capaldi lends a deliciously silken purr to an eventually deathly ruse on which time is running out. For what it's worth, the vocal timbre that the Scottish actor has adopted for this part reminded me of Sir Tom Stoppard, but that's surely no bad thing, either.