The Comedy of Errors (18 page)

To a jazzy score, composed by Guy Wolfenden, the lyrics, built from turning points in the plot, had the effect of heightening unreality. So, for example, Egeon’s predicament at the opening, in which he must find someone to pay his ransom or be put to death, was worked up into a chorus number, in which advice was offered about how to find the money. The production transferred to the Aldwych Theatre and returned for a second season at Stratford the following year.

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In 1976, Trevor Nunn’s production went to the extreme of “lavish ornamentation”; the RST stage was festooned with fairy lights, flanked by cafés and overflowing tourist stalls, and peopled by mobsters and prostitutes.

Nunn’s triumphantly successful musical, following the Williams production, raised the bar even higher for the next attempt. In 1983, Adrian Noble, again at the RST, responded with a production rooted in classic clowning: against a curved white cyclorama with one door and one window, to the ragtime backing of a five-piece pit orchestra, the cast appeared as a circus troupe, baggily clad and garishly made up—the Antipholus twins with blue faces, the Dromios with red noses. Mainly harlequinade, it drew from other influences too, from vaudeville, musical comedy, even operetta.

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Adrian Noble’s 1983 production was rooted in classic clowning; the cast appeared as a circus troupe, baggily clad and garishly made up.

In Ian Judge’s RST production, Desmond Barrit played both the Antipholus twins and Graham Turner both the Dromios. Peter Holland
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suggests that Judge may have been influenced by the recent BBC television production, in which one actor had played each pair of twins—a trick far more easily pulled off on-screen than onstage. Onstage, this doubling makes the audience very aware of the actors’ skill in apparently being in two places at once—it emphasizes theatricality. This theatricality was reflected in the production’s design. The play opened in Egeon’s prison, a brutal place, suggesting that Ephesus was under a heavily totalitarian regime, but this grim reality gave way to a surrealist set—a rectangular playing area surrounded by nine brightly colored doors, with echoes of Escher and Magritte and the Beatles’
Yellow Submarine
. The production was busy and inventive— and hugely popular, going on extended tour after its London run.

Tim Supple’s production, starting at the Other Place and designed to tour, made a huge contrast with the accretions of props, extras, and business that preceding productions had required. On a spare set with a young cast, Supple delivered a version of the play—cut to just two hours and played in contemporary costume—designed to appeal to young audiences as it toured with its brand-new mobile auditorium to nontraditional venues around the country. To the unobtrusive and eerie backing of Adrian Lee’s music, played on Middle Eastern instruments, the production gave full value to the play’s farcical frenzy, while daring to be moving as well. One critic noted,

After a successful tour, the production had a short run at the Young Vic in 1997.

Lynne Parker, associate director of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and artistic director of Rough Magic, directed this production—her first for the RSC—joined by designer Blaithin Sheerin, with whom she had worked on several previous productions for Rough Magic. The result was a design for the RST stage which fully expressed the influences on which Parker was drawing:

(Charles Spencer missed the Courtesan whose skirt blew up like Marilyn Monroe’s.) Spencer was quick to point out the dangers of such a riot of references and to celebrate Parker’s success in avoiding them:

The production opened in threatening film noir style as a lift clanked its way to stage level to disgorge a handcuffed Egeon, accompanied by a heavyset jailer in shades, to be sentenced by a brutal mafioso duke, and as the play proceeded toward its joyful final reunions, Parker suggested that the sinister was still present: there were dark
shadows across the city square and unexplained groups of top-hatted, beak-nosed warlocks gathered in corners. The farce, however, was joyous and riotous, with Keystone Kops-style chases that brought the house down.

Nancy Meckler made her RST debut with this production and brought to it her years with the Shared Experience company, creating a powerful ensemble piece with a strong narrative drive (the concern with narrative was evident from the start, as Egeon’s speech in which he told of the loss of his wife and sons was acted out with puppets). Her actors moved in a world of mystery and wonder, wonderfully funny while constantly in danger of losing themselves. The production’s success lay “in the way it mixes an ensemble evocation of Ephesus with a study in the mystery of identity.”
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This Ephesus was gloriously vulgar, a world teeming with “pickpockets, parasites and ponces,”
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not to mention acrobats and girls with hula hoops. The large cast was “blissfully endowed with madcap energy,” but at the same time “the vagrant extras remind us of the harshness of the world when one loses identity and home.”
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Designer Katrina Lindsay dressed the cast in layers of striped, checked, and wildly assorted clothes; there was a plethora of tall stovepipe hats. The effect was of Dickensian London run mad. Benedict Nightingale complained that “the citizens can’t decide whether they belong to Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Gormenghast or Struwwelpeter.”
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Other critics welcomed this elusiveness: “Here, with its anger, suspicion, mercantile greed and sense of chaos, is a world twinned with our own. Just through the looking glass. Just out of reach.”
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Above the stage hung a great white canopy that was part circus tent, part sail, and part blank white screen—a setting for carnival, a reminder of shipwreck, a blank on which the characters could paint their identities.

says the visiting Antipholus as he arrives in Ephesus, and even while the audience hopes that the comic misunderstandings will continue, it also longs to see these lost brothers reunited. As we generally look for the pairing of lovers at the end of a comedy. we look here for the pairing of twins. In 1962, when the whole ensemble came onstage at the opening and found definitive pieces of costume for their characters, they entered as a group but exited in pairs, establishing the pairing theme at the outset. Ian Richardson and Alec McCowen, both thin-faced and precise, were convincingly similar as the Antipholus twins, though clearly differentiated in character—McCowen, as the Syracusan twin, round-eyed and round-mouthed with astonishment, Richardson sadly accepting and wildly furious by turns. In keeping with the commedia style, the two Dromios were given identical grotesque noses. In 1972, when the production was revived, John Wood was hailed as a wildly funny Antipholus of Ephesus.

In the 1976 updated musical version, Roger Rees and Mike Gwilym were finely contrasted and physically close: Rees was the wide-eyed tourist (wearing his camera even in the bedroom) while Gwilym was a sharp, gum-chewing resident of Las Vegas–style Ephesus. Michael Williams and Nickolas Grace, as the Dromios, were clowns with red hair and baggy jeans. In 1983, Richard O’Callaghan and Henry Goodman were red-nosed knockabout clowns, but Peter McEnery and Paul Greenwood, as the Antipholuses, were clownlike too, their faces painted blue and their emotions expressed in highly physical performances. In the 1996 touring production, the Dromios were shaven-headed—contemporary, tough, and vulnerable.

The 2000 production exploited David Tennant’s gift for comedy: a young Antipholus of Syracuse, he was gangly, goofy, wide-eyed, and polite before flipping to distraught mania. Ant hony Howell, by contrast, was a confident Ephesian spiv. The final reunions were given full value with a joyful tableau that balanced the darkness of the opening. Ian Hughes, who played Dromio of Syracuse, thought

For her 2005 production, Nancy Meckler found “an uncanny set of dead ringers.”
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A pair of statuesque black actors, Joe Dixon and Christopher Colquhoun, played the Antipholus twins, and two fine clowns, Jonathan Slinger and Forbes Masson, played a pair of scrawny Dromios with gravity-defying ginger quiffs. Slinger played the more cheerful clown, rolling with the punches, while Masson was surlier. At the end, while their masters were joyfully reunited, they were more guarded, more concerned to preserve their own identities.

When Desmond Barrit and Graham Turner each played a pair of twins in Ian Judge’s 1990 production, the usual problem of making two actors convincingly identical was reversed—Graham Turner wore different colored waistcoats to differentiate the two Dromios— and much of the audience’s delight was generated by the doubling. Peter Holland, who was unhappy with the doubling, thought

Holland was particularly concerned about the effect of the doubling on the play’s ending. The moment when the two pairs of twins find themselves onstage together is the moment the audience has been wondering about—the moment when the illusion that there are four
actors will be shattered. The moment was skillfully stage-managed by the use of body doubles, but Holland comments,