The Comedy of Errors (20 page)

PH:
I found that idea very liberating. Because the play fundamentally works in the spirit of confusion and mistakes, that for me became enhanced and more interesting
because
of the fact that it was played out within one day and one place. What Shakespeare does brilliantly is intensify what the play is working on, like the idea of these confusions escalating, which wouldn’t have such power if they were more spread out, they would become more diluted. So I didn’t
really have any problems with that, I actually found that really satisfying to work from.

Twins are visually indistinguishable—that’s the basis of the comedy—but did you and your actors discover big differences of character between the Antipholus boys?

TS:
Yes, many. Not as many as there would have been if the later, more sophisticated Shakespeare had written the play but the later Shakespeare had moved on and this play has its own exquisite poise that clearly delights audiences throughout time and cultures. The men are similar enough to keep the situation simple and clear, but there are enough differences to provide the basis of very different characters onstage. Perhaps these differences are as much differences of circumstances as nature but that is one of the fundamental questions of the play: What makes us? Nature or nurture? Our genes or our experience?

Antipholus of Ephesus is successful, busy, out all the time, flirting with courtesans, neglecting his home and wife. He is materially minded, scornful and cruel to his Dromio. He is a tough-minded man living in a tough trading environment. His brother is more reflective, more ready to talk to his Dromio as a companion, and he is unmarried and unattached so he’s searching for companionship. He has left his home to find the answers to his existence while Antipholus of Ephesus is wrapped up in the material and physical issues of domestic, rooted life.

Of course, they are two sides of one character common throughout humanity; one travels and the other builds the nest. When situation takes over they both act alike: they both beat their Dromios when they cannot find the words to deal with their exasperation.

NM:
I was deeply impressed by how different the twins are and we discovered in rehearsal that this might come directly from their childhood experiences. The local twin, Antipholus of Ephesus, knows little of his past: only that he was found by Corinthian sailors and eventually distinguished himself in the army, which led to him being given a very wealthy prestigious wife as a prize for his gallantry.

He and his servant do not know that they have twins. This Antipholus is an important local figure and he is beginning to behave badly, cheating on his wife, gambling, physically maltreating his servant. Given his past and lack of knowledge about it, we postulated that he was deeply insecure about who he really was and needed to discover his roots. This accounted for his arrogant, brash, selfish behavior.

By contrast, Antipholus of Syracuse and his servant do know about their past. This Antipholus knows his parents and knows he is a twin. He feels he will be incomplete until he finds his other half. He has even taken on his brother’s name and has spent years searching for him, so passionate is his quest. His nature is gentle, yearning, lonely, melancholic. He is good to his servant and treats him as a companion: thus two very different twins.

PH:
Yes, I suppose we did. My starting point and approach was very much physical, as it is with all the work I do, so even though we were

8.
From 2009, Paul Hunter’s production with Antipholus of Ephesus (James Tucker) as “a bit of a showman.”

looking at this wonderful play, the starting point was much more about how the twins are physically, and trying to learn about their characters from what they
do
. So those differences emerged through playing and through action, rather than through discussion. There was a moment when we wanted Antipholus of Ephesus, the one who is ostensibly “at home,” to appear earlier than he actually does in Shakespeare’s play, so that the audience would visually get an image of the two twins right at the top of the play. They don’t see each other, but we see them, and as an audience you go, “Ah yes, there they are,” rather than waiting for quite a while for the entrance of Antipholus of Ephesus. By doing that it also showed quite a difference in their personalities, because Antipholus of Ephesus in some ways is revealed to be a bit of a showman (although maybe not when his wife’s around!). In our production you saw him doing a stupid routine playing spoons, and the band onstage loved him, but the other Antipholus [of Syracuse] who arrived couldn’t play them at all—he’s less of a showman in that sense. So rather than it being discussed, it tended to emerge through improvising and playing with the situations.

TS:
The Dromios are two sides of another common aspect of ourselves: the servant. Dromio of Ephesus, like his master, is more wrapped up in the daily, material issues of home, time, food, and other people. His is a social life and his main concern is how he can get food, drink, and women without getting beaten. We can see the difference when his brother runs into the path of his master, terrified by the sexual encounter with the cook in Act 3 Scene 2. His language betrays his wide experience of travel and his terror betrays his lack of street wisdom. He knows the world but he doesn’t know life and society. In that way it could be said that the Syracuse brothers are spiritually or internally wiser than their brothers while being socially or materially more naive.

However, the similarities are as important as the differences; the same is true of the two sisters, Adriana and Luciana. They are not identical twins but they are intimate sisters who have a different experience of life and a different way of seeing marriage and duty and also of dealing with men.

NM:
The Dromios are also distinctly different. Ephesus is always being beaten by his master, feels like a victim, is treated as lowly and in consequence is often in a fury. Syracuse is a companion to his master and wants only to please him. He is especially good at lightening his master’s mood when he is filled with sadness.

PH:
I think in a sense that emerges more clearly through the text, in that even though it’s very confusing for Dromio of Syracuse, in some ways part of the difference is that it felt even more confusing for Dromio of Ephesus, who lives there—locked out of his own house, beaten so repeatedly for things he doesn’t quite understand—so I think those differences came more from their experiences in the story.

Very often the chaos and mistaken identity in
The Comedy of Errors
lends itself to the farcical. To what extent did you exploit this within your production?

TS:
Our simple approach was never to add or to exaggerate anything. We played all aspects of farce and mistaken identity as a natural part of the action and consequence of action. We didn’t underplay it either; we tried to make it just so. This meant that while it was funny at times it was also strange and touching at other times. I believe that if you play the farce up you smother other possibilities, other textures and other truths. It’s the same throughout Shakespeare: most strikingly with the Mechanicals in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. Stanislavski said something very important for actors: there is no different style of acting required by comedy and tragedy—simply different actions. I think that this is something directors must remember too. Laughter is a wonderful occurrence but it can be cheaply won and it can drown out other treasures.

NM:
The play is written in a commedia dell’arte mode and suggests huge amounts of slapstick. Beatings and chases and quack doctors curing fake patients abound. I wanted to evoke a very rich street life, inspired by descriptions of London in Shakespeare’s day. The character of Doctor Pinch, a quack doctor, became key to the story. We began the play with Egeon arriving in the harbor of Ephesus early one morning just as Doctor Pinch and his entourage are coming into town. The whole town pours out onto the streets to welcome him and watch him
work his magical medical cures. We worked with an actor from Theatre de Complicite on an exercise called the “flock of birds,” or “shoal of fish.” This meant groups of characters would throng together and move as a swirling organism, following the action. It gave a heightened quality to the play, animated the street scenes, and gave great scope for exaggerated characters, costumes, and extreme hairstyles.

PH:
Very definitely, and it’s partly why I was drawn to it when I was asked to do it. Some people might argue that it’s one of Shakespeare’s most comedic of plays, in the sense that the situation, and to a certain extent the characters, are almost completely out of the world of commedia dell’arte, which is the style of theater that farce emerged out of. I was very keen to embrace that, and we spent a lot of time exploring and pushing that as far as we possibly could. So ultimately, for me, as long as the actors are committed to what they are doing, and ironically, that they’re serious about what they’re doing—in some ways more serious than normal, because they have to be deadly serious about the situation for us to find it funny—then we’re able to push it quite far. So, for instance, when the Abbess comes on dressed up in full nun’s habit and tries to quieten everybody down, she stamps her feet, and by stamping her feet this develops into a tap dance, which the whole company joins in with. And that for me is symptomatic of what the production is about really: if someone said “What moment defines the show?” I would say, “It’s when a nun tap-dances and then everybody else tap-dances!” We kept talking about how Ephesus is a world which is infected by a madness, and the arrival of these two sets of twins turns the world mad for twenty-four hours. So yes, we definitely embraced that side of it.

The women in the play can be seen to embody female archetypes— the shrewish wife, the idealistic maid, the whore, the nun. Did you find it difficult in your production to make these parts more rounded characters, or did the stereotypes add to the comedy?

TS:
The stereotypical nature of the women in the play is akin to the stereotypical nature of the men but more so, which is rather like most of Shakespeare’s plays in that the women are not as fully expressed characters (with some few great exceptions). In the case of
this play the use of strong types throughout the population of the play is part of what makes it what it is: an exquisite and satisfyingly simple comedy. The great richness of Shakespeare peeks through, however, and there is ample in the characters of all four women from which to evolve a total sense of living character onstage.

NM:
It is true that these characters are archetypes, but I feel the best route to comedy is through taking people seriously and being very specific about what drives them. When their drives or aspirations are identified, the next step is to intensify those drives, making the characters obsessive to the point of becoming absurd or comic. This means real hopes and fears and longings feed the high comedy.

PH:
I think there’s something quite pure about the fact that those archetypes are there. Now obviously I think because of the actors I had and the work we did that it hopefully becomes more detailed and rounded as you explore the play, but I certainly embraced the types they were, because you’re right, they are types—the put-upon servant, the shrewish wife. They are there, and from my point of view it would be foolish to ignore that, or, to a certain extent, to try to apply too much psychology to that, because a lot of the fun in the play comes from quite simple interactions; they just happen to go wrong.

Law and order frame the play through the words of the duke, but in your production to what extent did this framing device serve to make order of the prior chaos?

TS:
In our production the law and the authority that comes with it was simply an expression of the social context of Ephesus. The wild emptiness of the world experienced by Egeon and his son and slave is captured and made dangerous by the strong society of Ephesus. Both threaten the other: the law of the land and the conflict between the lands gives edge to the situation of the visitors while the strange happenings brought about by the twins overwhelm life in the city for a day. Even the duke cannot untangle it. It is the Abbess who provides the final piece of the jigsaw, and while she is an abbess, she is also a mother and it is this that provides the potent emotional force of the ending that brings order and calm and allows social life to continue.