Read The Comedy of Errors Online
Authors: William Shakespeare
The Comedy of Errors (16 page)
A court performance is recorded as part of the Christmas festivities on 28 December 1604, but there are no further performances recorded until the eighteenth century, although the play’s title seems to have caught on and become proverbial to judge by the number of eighteenth-century references.
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Even then, Shakespeare’s play appeared only in drastically cut and adapted texts that emphasized
farce and romance elements or turned it into a musical entertainment. Dislike of the play’s improbable plot and the judgment of earlier scholars, that it was an apprentice piece derived from the Roman comedies of Plautus, adversely affected its place in the repertoire and history in performance.
The first adaptation was a farce of 1716,
Every Body Mistaken
. The next in 1734,
See If You Like It, or ’Tis All a Mistake
, was more popular and successful and it was revived throughout the eighteenth century. In 1762 Thomas Hull’s
The Twins
added extra scenes and songs. It was a modified version of Hull’s play that John Philip Kemble presented. W. Woods produced a three-act farce,
The Twins, or Which Is Which
in 1780, and in 1819 Frederick Reynolds turned it into an opera with a selection of songs drawn from the “Plays, Poems and Sonnets of Shakespeare” with music by Thomas Arne and Mozart, among others. Reynolds’ version enjoyed great popular, if not critical, success and included hunting and drinking scenes.
The Comedy of Errors
has a history of musical adaptation apart from Frederick Reynolds’ musical extravaganza. In 1786 the Anglo-Italian Stephen Storace composed a score for a French translation of the play
Gli Equivoci
, with a libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte (the librettist for Mozart’s most famous operas). In the same year another musical version was produced at Fontainebleau by André Grétry with libretto by Joseph Patrat, based on Plautus’
Menaechmi
with borrowings from Shakespeare.
It was Samuel Phelps who finally restored Shakespeare’s text to the stage in his productions at Sadler’s Wells Theatre in 1855 and 1856. Its ensemble nature and lack of an obvious star turn may have contributed to the play’s unpopularity in the age of actor managers and spectacular sets. The 1864 production for the celebrations of Shakespeare’s tercentenary at the Princess’ Theatre was played without scene breaks, with few textual cuts, and featured the brothers Charles and Harry Webb as near-identical Dromios.
The first production at the Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon was in 1882, directed by Edward Compton, who played Dromio of Ephesus. There was another London production in 1883, but in 1895 William Poel returned the play to Gray’s Inn for his production with the Elizabethan Stage Society, whose aim was to recreate original stage practices as far as possible. F. R. Benson staged the play in 1905 at the Coronet Theatre, playing Antipholus of Syracuse, although critics were still disapproving of the play itself.
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1.
From 1864, Princess’ Theatre, with Charles and Harry Webb as “near identical Dromios.”
There were two further productions at the Old Vic: in 1915, in which Sybil Thorndike played Adriana, and in 1927, in which the twins wore false noses, two turned up and two turned down. In the open-air performance in Regent’s Park in 1934 the play formed half of a double bill with
Comus
, Milton’s masque in honor of chastity. Ben Greet co-directed a production at London’s Terry’s Theatre in 1899, playing Dromio of Ephesus, a role he reprised in the 1916 revival at Stratford. In 1905 Benson had played Antipholus of Syracuse there and in 1914 Patrick Kirwan had played Dromio of Syracuse.
The most exciting, successful, and influential production in the first half of the twentieth century was Theodore Komisarjevsky’s anarchic, inventive staging, filled once again with music, dancing, and commedia dell’arte clowning, at Stratford in 1938. The Mediterranean-style, romantic set of pastel-colored houses was dominated by a clock tower on the back wall in which the clock struck the hour and the hands whizzed round to catch up, demonstrating the passage of time and adding urgency to Egeon’s plight. The production was a great box-office success while critics, still dismissive of the play’s claims to serious consideration, found it successful and entertaining: “On that barren and tedious farce it superimposes the wittiest and gayest extravaganzas.”
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In the same year Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart successfully adapted the play to produce the American musical comedy
The Boys from Syracuse
, which was filmed two years later. Yet another adaptation,
A New Comedy of Errors, or Too Many Twins
at the Mercury Theatre in 1940, amalgamated the work of Plautus, Shakespeare, and Molière. The play has seemed almost infinitely flexible: a Victorian musical comedy in Cambridge in 1951, the following year set in the Near East in Edwardian dress with music by Sir Arthur Sullivan in productions in Canterbury and London. It was teamed in an unlikely double bill with Shakespeare’s bloodiest revenge tragedy,
Titus Andronicus
, in Walter Hudd’s 1957 production at the Old Vic, in which Robert Helpmann’s brilliantly timed slapstick as Doctor Pinch was the highlight of the show.
2.
In 1938, Theodore Komisarjevsky’s “anarchic, inventive” production at Stratford was filled “with music, dancing and
commedia dell’arte
clowning.”
The outstanding production of the late twentieth century was Clifford Williams’ 1962 staging at Stratford. The play’s critical reputation was enhanced by serious academic study and its place in the repertoire seemed assured after Williams’ groundbreaking production. Many of the most notable productions since have come from the RSC, discussed in detail below.
The play’s farcical elements lend it particularly well to commedia dell’arte treatment, with its stereotyped characters and broad physical humor. One technique tried on a number of occasions has been the playing of both twins by the same actor. While ideally suited to film, it often disappoints in the theater as the recognition scenes reuniting the family prove anticlimactic. Douglas Seale introduced this innovation to qualified approval in 1963 at the American Shakespeare Theater: “the arrangement works extremely well except at the end when the denouement requires two men on the stage to do the work of four. However, the charade atmosphere is so well caught that nobody cares.”
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It was set in “a 17th-century framework” with
a gay, sunny set that reflects the light of the Mediterranean and his handsome costumes … Mr Seale has helped himself to the traditions of commedia dell’arte, adding bystanders en masse and even a Harlequin and Columbine to decorate or react to the events of the story.
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This device failed to impress one critic, however: “as the evening progressed one began to wonder just what these figures had to do with the play.”
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Ian Judge in his 1990 production for the RSC (discussed below) also doubled the parts, as did Kathryn Hunter in her production at the Globe Theatre in 1999. For one critic it was “Doomed to failure before it started by the alluring but always fatal decision to double the Antipholuses and the Dromios.”
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Nevertheless, the production was popular with audiences, who enjoyed the broad physical clowning of Marcello Magni as the Dromios, but undone by its relentless comic opportunism:
The setting was vaguely Turkish, with middle eastern instruments accompanying the action from above, and turbaned men and veiled women peopling the world of Ephesus in a potentially interesting way. There were merchants of all sorts, too, plying their wares between the scenes, but it was the fish merchants who began to give the intentions of the production away, their special line in plastic fish proving irresistible as missiles both on stage and between stage and groundlings. The plastic fish epitomized the project.
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Danny Scheie’s thoroughgoing doubling, with just seven actors for all sixteen parts, in his Aurora Theater production in 2000, succeeded by virtue of its polish and high-octane performances:
Setting the piece in a vague early-20th century NYC, Scheie lifts ideas from the prior century’s stage melodramas, vaudeville, even the Three Stooges and “Gone With the Wind.” A red curtain at one end of the small, unelevated playspace is sole “set”; gags include the aristocratic twins’ death-sentenced father
Egeon (Joan Mankin) illustrating his tragic family separation 33 years ago via classroom transparency projector. But humor is mostly dependent on the terrific cast’s game slapstick, broad albeit precise physical characterizations, and spot-on timing.
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Lacking faith in the play itself, many directors have gone for gimmicks. Robin Phillips’ 1975 Stratford Festival, Ontario, however, justified its Wild West setting with the duke as a wealthy rancher, the Antipholuses as Mississippi riverboat gamblers, and the Dromios as cowboys and a shotgun-toting Emilia. The transposition, symbolized by a “huge covered wagon that was at various times a kind of tiring-room, a cornucopia disgorging hundreds of actors and acrobats, a priory, and a convenient kind of wall to hang beer-mugs, laundry and so on,”
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which dominated the set, worked well with its rich implications of migration and displacement. Robert Woodruff’s 1983 production at the Goodman Theater, Chicago, featured the well-known juggling act the Flying Karamazov Brothers as the two sets of twins, with the fifth playing Shakespeare, plus clowns Avner Eisenberg and a cross-dressed Ethyl Eichelberger, playing both Emilia and the Courtesan, complete with signature cartwheels. Woodruff played “fast, loose and lunatic with the original”
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and the production attracted criticism and praise in equal measure:
Early in the performance the strangers from Syracuse made a hazardous journey across the stage through flying objects— the uncertainties and dangers of Ephesus thus made palpable in an instant. And at the end, the Karamazovs as the reunited sets of twins juggled multi-colored pins in perfect unison. The routine ended with the pins gracefully falling through space to repose in the jugglers’ hands, a visual as well as an emotional restoration of harmony and order. These two pantomime moments, accompanied by the music of a strolling Klezmer band, suggested what might have been had word and action complemented one another throughout.
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For Phyllida Lloyd’s influential and highly-acclaimed Bristol Old Vic production in 1989, Anthony Ward designed a surreal, gravity-defying
set through which characters made joke entrances and exits. Caroline Loncq as Luciana (who was to reprise the role the following year at the RSC) and Rosie Rowell as Adriana were singled out for praise. There was another open-air production at Regent’s Park in 1996 directed by Ian Talbot, the same year as Tim Supple’s small-scale touring version for the RSC. In 1998 Edward Hall directed his Propeller Company at the Watermill Theatre, Newbury. According to one critic, “Hall has touched on some of the true roots of Shakespearian comedy by bringing out its commedia dell’arte dimension … although he has a way to go to bring the play to full flower.”
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Surprisingly, there were over forty musical productions of the German version
Die Komödie der Irrungen
in the late twentieth century. An American rap version in 2000,
The Bomb-itty of Errors
, a “frenetic collision of hip-hop and Shakespeare’s” play,
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started life as the five cast members’ senior thesis at New York University’s Experimental Theater Wing before its successful off-Broadway transfer. In 2001 the Mansaku Company performed
The Kyogen of Errors
at Japan’s Globe Theatre, employing the Kyogen tradition of stylized comic movement, a comic version of the more formal Japanese Noh theater. As is so frequently the case with this play, Brian T. Crowe’s production at the 2001 New Jersey Shakespeare Festival was criticized for its excessive reliance on comic business: