The Comedy of Errors

by William Shakespeare

  AT THE RSC

  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.

  The World of Ephesus

  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."43

  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:

  They say this town is full of cozenage,

  As nimble jugglers that deceive the eye,

  Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind,

  Soul-killing witches that deform the body (1.2.97-100).

  1962--"Unmistakeably" an RSC Production

  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."44 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."45 Interestingly, Hall himself is said not to have liked the production.46

  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."47 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,"48 wrote Harold Hobson, a view echoed by Michael Billington:49 "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 recreate 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.

  1976--The Musical

  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."51 The RST stage was festooned with fairy lights, flanked by cafes 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.

  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 a
bout how to find the money. The production transferred to the Aldwych Theatre and returned for a second season at Stratford the following year.

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

  1983--Roaring Ragtime Circus

  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.

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

  1990--Surrealism

  In Ian Judge's RST production, Desmond Barrit played both the Antipholus twins and Graham Turner both the Dromios. Peter Holland52 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.

  1996--Contemporary

  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,

  At the end of the play, two sets of twins, a husband and wife were reunited after more than 30 years, but there was not the sense of sudden celebration as is usually the way with comedies. Instead, the real emotion which would be felt by a family reunited was explored. Egeon did not have a kiss for his estranged wife as he passed her to leave the stage and it took time for the brothers to embrace. As the characters filed off slowly at the end, each displayed wonder and disbelief at what had gone before. With emotion running high, the celebratory feel was dampened: the audience knew all would be well but were left feeling it would take time.53

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

  2000--Cinematic Influence

  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:

  The show echoes the Marx brothers, the Bob Hope and Bing Crosby road movies and even the Carry On films. You can also detect the influence of Casablanca, Merchant Ivory, A Streetcar Named Desire, Fawlty Towers, the great P.G. Wodehouse and doubtless many others that escaped my delighted gaze.54

  (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:

  This is a risky undertaking and a slack, self-indulgent production would have sunk ignominiously with all hands. But the action is so fast, the comic performances so sharp and engaging, the humour so infectious that there is no danger of that.55

  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.

  2005--Shared Experience

  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."56

  This Ephesus was gloriously vulgar, a world teeming with "pickpockets, parasites and ponces,"57 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."58 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."59 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."60

  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.

  Seeing Double

  I to the world am like a drop of water

  That in the ocean seeks another drop (1.2.35-6)

  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

  It seemed right and proper that Shakespeare should leave both sets of twins on stage at the end of the scene. No lines are given to the Antipholuses to express their joy at having found each other--one suspects a few awkward questions to come behind closed doors--but Shakespeare puts the two put-upon and much maligned Dromios centre stage to sum up their feelings for each other. The writing confirms what I had suspected all along: Shakespeare likes these servants. He, like all those watching from the sides of the rehearsal room, brushes away a tear of emotion, thankful that they have found in each other, not only a brother, but someone to love.61