The Comedy of Errors (17 page)

Despite this, the production was ultimately judged a success:

Similar problems beset the Aquila Theater Company’s 2002 production at the East 13th Street Theater:

Lisa Carter as Adriana and Mira Kingsley as Luciana were both praised for “show[ing] what can happen when actors act and are not merely being directed for comic effect.”
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David Farr’s Bristol Old Vic production in 2003 won unanimous praise for its poised presentation of the play’s diverse elements:

Northern Broadsides’ 2005 production boasted remarkable look-alikes as the two pairs of twins:

Despite, however, the 1950s themed design and swing band score, Rutter’s interpretation of the text was seen to be “over-reliant on slapstick, [it] hurtles along with little regard for complexity of character.”
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The play’s popularity and place in the modern repertoire has seemed assured since the mid-twentieth century. Time and again productions have demonstrated that a proper attention to the play’s subtleties and complexities over and above its purely comic, farcical elements will be amply rewarded in the theater.

Apart from the 1940 Rodgers and Hart musical film of
The Boys from Syracuse
, there have been a number of successful television and film productions, including a 1964 TV “Festival” screening of Clifford Williams’ RSC production with Donald Sinden, Alec McCowan, Ian Richardson, Diana Rigg, and Janet Suzman, and a 1978 Russian version directed by Vadim Gauzner. Trevor Nunn’s acclaimed RSC production with Judi Dench, Francesca Annis (who won a Bafta for her performance as Luciana), Griffith Jones, and Roger Rees was filmed for Associated Television in 1978. The later BBC Shakespeare version (1983) took advantage of the technical possibilities of split-screen work to use the same actors for each twin, with Michael Kitchen as the Antipholuses and Roger Daltrey (lead singer of the Who) as the Dromios. The inclusion of a troupe of commedia dell’arte mime artists divided critics, as did Daltrey’s performance, the acting honors going to Cyril Cusack as Egeon, Charles Gray as Solinus, and Wendy Hiller as Emilia. Robert Woodruff’s production was screened on American television in 1987. An updated American version,
Big Business
, was filmed in 1988, and the following year Richard Monette directed
The Comedy of Errors
for Canadian television. In 1994, on the anniversary of its first performance there, Anthony Besch directed a revival of the play at Gray’s Inn with music by Julian Slade (an updated BBC Sunday-Night Theatre production from 1954).

Written at the beginning of Shakespeare’s writing career,
The Comedy of Errors
is the work of a young man who wanted to make his mark. Taking as his model the
Menaechmi
by Plautus, the acknowledged master of Roman comedy, Shakespeare demonstrated his comic skill and ambition by creating not one but two sets of identical twins, thus hugely extending the play’s comic potential. It is Shakespeare’s only farce and productions stand or fall by their success in building to an anarchic comic climax. Farce, however, requires a lunatic logic and there is nothing anarchic about the play’s meticulous plotting, which produces the comic frenzy. The play is disciplined too in following its classical model and observing unity of time: it is Shakespeare’s only play, apart from
The Tempest
, in which the whole of the action takes place in the course of one day. The resulting compression of the action is an important element in the play’s comic drive. The play needs to move us too. Even as we laugh, we must be yearning for the reunions which we think we know must come. If we cannot engage with the characters, the play will be a mere harlequinade and will not do justice to Shakespeare’s ability, even in this slightest of his comedies, to blend gaiety and gravity.

It is a play with which a director can make a splash and, as Ian Hughes (Dromio of Syracuse in the 2000 production) comments, it “has a history of directorial manhandling which an audience seeing the play almost seems to expect.”
⁴²
There have been eight RSC productions of the play, including a revival in 1972 of the iconic 1962 production. When Clifford Williams took on the play in 1962, it had not been performed at Stratford for twenty-four years and was not regarded as part of the regular repertoire. Since then, it has been a particular challenge for directors as audiences and critics have gone to see it in the expectation of being delighted, and in the hope of a production even funnier and more inventive than the last. All but one production has been staged at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, exploiting the main house’s technical resources and audience potential.

Dominic Cavendish, in saluting Nancy Meckler’s 2005 production, sums up the play’s conflicting and complementary demands: “What happens … must, on the one hand, not matter a jot—and on the other, touch our deepest-rooted anxieties about who we are, and where we fit in.”
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The director’s vision and the designer’s realization of it are hardly distinguishable in productions of this play. Each director is looking for a physical context which will exploit the play’s possibilities and all, in one way or another, focus on the strange and slightly threatening atmosphere with which Shakespeare endows his Ephesus:

In the second year of Peter Hall’s tenure as artistic director at the RSC, he was faced with a disaster: Paul Scofield, who was to return after fourteen years to play King Lear, fell ill from exhaustion, and Hall was forced to postpone the production with 30,000 tickets already sold. Needing a strong alternative attraction, he took the gamble of giving Clifford Williams three weeks to rehearse a revival of
The Comedy of Errors
, not seen at the RST for twenty-four years. The story of its triumphant success has passed into RSC folklore as “a public validation of the company ideal and an exemplar of the company’s recurring triumph over adversity in the best Dunkirk spirit.”
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This production, above all, put the RSC’s distinctive stamp on a play for the first time. The highly influential critic Kenneth Tynan, calling it “unmistakeably” an RSC production, went on to say, “The statement is momentous: it means Peter Hall’s troupe has developed, uniquely in Britain, a classical style of its own.”
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Interestingly, Hall himself is said not to have liked the production.
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Williams’ production not only established an RSC style but had an enormous influence on theater beyond the RSC. The opening, in which the ensemble, dressed in identical gray boilersuits, walked, with balletic precision, onto a set of three bare platforms, like huge steps, and took up elements of costume to assume their characters, was echoed, in one way and another, in the following years in theaters, churches, and school halls across Britain.

3.
In 1962, Clifford Williams’ influential RST production, with Ian Howitson as Dromio of Ephesus, Ian Richardson as Antipholus of Ephesus, Pauline Letts as Emilia, Tony Church as Egeon, Alec McCowen as Antipholus of Syracuse, and Barry MacGregor as Dromio of Syracuse, put the RSC’s distinctive stamp on a play for the first time.

Under Williams’ direction, the play became a sophisticated theatrical charade. The production was fast, sharp, and physical, with a strong commedia dell’arte feel. After the monochrome opening mime, the actors reentered in full costume in strong, bright colors: “Mr Williams gradually adds colour and detail like a painter filling out
a canvas.”
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Although the scenery was minimal (when Ephesian Dromio locked his master out of his house, he simply drew the outline of a door in the air), the stage was thronged with people—the masked grotesques, clowns, and courtesans of Venetian carnival. The ensemble was in full play. Not only did Williams and the company rehabilitate the play as entertainment, but they found a key to it: “The wild comedy of irrational recognitions is given consistency and a curious force by the suggestion that there is, behind it, something vaguely disquieting,”
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wrote Harold Hobson, a view echoed by Michael Billington:
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“Two things make it remarkable: Mr Williams’s recognition of the fact that Shakespeare’s farce about double identical twins is rooted in human character, and his ability to highlight the weirdness and mystery inherent in the story.”
The Birmingham Mail’s
critic observed, “I am taking bets that it will not be 24 years before
The Comedy of Errors
is done again.”
⁵⁰

In fact, this production had a long afterlife of its own: it played for another season at Stratford in 1963, then transferred to the Aldwych Theatre in London for two seasons, as well as touring nationally and internationally in 1964 and 1965 before being revived in Stratford in 1972. This revival was another piece of troubleshooting, for 1972 was the season when
Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra
, and
Titus Andronicus
were produced under the title “The Romans.” To leaven the tragedy, Trevor Nunn’s intention had been to include a new production of
The Comedy of Errors
, played in Roman costume to emphasize its origins in the work of Plautus. The intended director, however, had to withdraw and Nunn turned to Williams, who was heavily committed to other work and had no time to rethink the play, but agreed to re-create the 1962 production. He was able to spend only two weeks with the cast before leaving to fulfill commitments in Scandinavia and leaving rehearsals to his assistant director, Euan Smith. Interestingly, though neither Smith nor any of the young cast had seen the 1962 production, what emerged from rehearsal was remarkably similar to the original.

After the success of the 1962 production and its long afterlife in London, on tour and in revival, the next director of the play for the
RSC would be faced by a huge challenge. Trevor Nunn addressed it by directing a production that was as different as possible from the Williams concept: “Nunn moves from the balletic economy of Clifford Williams’s version to the opposite extreme of lavish ornamentation, not to mention reworking the piece as a musical.”
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The RST stage was festooned with fairy lights, flanked by cafés and overflowing tourist stalls, and peopled by mobsters and prostitutes. While never losing lightness of touch or an eye for comic potential, Nunn anticipated the malaise of the 1980s by suggesting that Ephesus is a world ruled by money, where acquisitiveness is the primary motivation and bartering, buying, and selling so dominate every interaction that nobody really notices who they are talking to.