THE COMEDY OF ERRORS
IN PERFORMANCE:
THE RSC AND BEYOND
The best way to understand a Shakespeare play is to see it or ideally to participate in it. By examining a range of productions, we may gain a sense of the extraordinary variety of approaches and interpretations that are possible--a variety that gives Shakespeare his unique capacity to be reinvented and made "our contemporary" four centuries after his death.
We begin with a brief overview of the play's theatrical and cinematic life, offering historical perspectives on how it has been performed. We then analyze in more detail a series of productions staged over the last half century by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The sense of dialogue between productions that can occur only when a company is dedicated to the revival and investigation of the Shakespeare canon over a long period, together with the uniquely comprehensive archival resource of promptbooks, program notes, reviews, and interviews held on behalf of the RSC at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, allows an "RSC stage history" to become a crucible in which the chemistry of the play can be explored.
Finally, we go to the horse's mouth. Modern theater is dominated by the figure of the director, who must hold together the whole play, whereas the actor must concentrate on his or her part. The director's viewpoint is therefore especially valuable. Shakespeare's plasticity is wonderfully revealed when we hear directors of highly successful productions answering the same questions in very different ways.
FOUR CENTURIES OF THE COMEDY OF ERRORS: AN OVERVIEW
It seems fitting that the first recorded performance of a play so often treated as farce should have ended in chaos and confusion. The Comedy of Errors is one of a handful of Shakespeare's plays for which we have an early eyewitness account. Henry Helmes described the performance of a play, identified as Shakespeare's, at Gray's Inn Hall for young men training to be lawyers, on the night of Innocents' Day, 28 December 1594:
The next grand Night was intended to be upon Innocents-Day at Night ... The Ambassador [of the Inner Temple] came ... about Nine of the Clock at Night ... there arose such a disordered Tumult and Crowd upon the Stage, that there was no Opportunity to effect that which was intended ... The Lord Ambassador and his Train thought that they were not so kindly entertained as was before expected, and thereupon would not stay any longer at that time, but, in a sort, discontented and displeased. After their Departure the Throngs and Tumults did somewhat cease, although so much of them continued, as was able to disorder and confound any good Inventions whatsoever. In regard whereof ... it was thought good not to offer anything of Account, saving Dancing and Revelling with Gentlewomen; and after such Sports, a Comedy of Errors (like to Plautus his Menechmus) was played by the Players. So that Night was begun, and continued to the end, in nothing but Confusion and Errors; whereupon, it was ever afterwards called The Night of Errors ... We preferred Judgments ... against a Sorcerer or Conjuror that was supposed to be the Cause of that confused Inconvenience ... And Lastly, that he foisted a Company of base and common Fellows to make up our Disorders with a Play of Errors and Confusions; and that Night had gained to us discredit, and itself a Nickname of Errors.20
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.21 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 Andre Gretry 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.22
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."23
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 Moliere. 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, Theodor
e 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."24 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.25
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."26
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."27 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.28
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.29
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,"30 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"31 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.32
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."33
Surprisingly, there were over forty musical productions of the German version Die Komodie 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,34 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:
Of course, The Comedy of Errors is an eternal dare to directors desperately seeking shtick ... And that's just where they err in the festival staging here. The precision that farce demands is not seen, only people bumping into people (yes, on purpose yet purposelessly).35
Despite this, the production was ultimately judged a success:
In the end, the joyous coming together of all the misunderstood, the maligned and the just plain mixed-up, bestow lovely moments of real exuberance. Mr. Crowe might have risen to the occasion far sooner had he trusted to the heart of the play, instead of pandering to its obvious invitation to excess.36
Similar problems beset the Aquila Theater Company's 2002 production at the East 13th Street Theater:
In its new production of Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors, no moment is deemed complete without a bit of fizzy stage business by the actors or a madcap tweak by the director, Robert Richmond. It's the kind of high-energy effort that encourages the audience to hoot and holler and overlook the fact that the rapid-fire stage antics are only intermittently inspired.37
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."38
David Farr's Bristol Old Vic production in 2003 won unanimous praise for its poised presentation of the play's diverse elements:
there is far more to this production than mere punchlines. Maintaining a firm grip on the above-the-line comic pacing, Farr has also tapped into the bleak undercurrent in Shakespeare's piece: the exploration of how important it is to have one's own unique identity, and the social and mental chaos into which we can so easily tumble if that essential certainty is destroyed. Ti Green's set offers a faintly surreal world where things are often not what they seem, with
echoes of Rene Magritte, M. C. Escher and the Prague of Franz Kafka ... Against this backdrop, Farr's staging blends expressionism, French farce and slapstick in equal measure to present Shakespeare's play as an entirely modern absurdist comedy.39
Northern Broadsides' 2005 production boasted remarkable look-alikes as the two pairs of twins:
when Conor Ryan and Andrew Cryer's uncannily similar forge-technicians turn up as the Antipholuses ... you really are persuaded that you're seeing double. The effect is compounded by the freakily well-matched ginger features and Liverpudlian accents of Simon Holland Roberts and Conrad Nelson, who play the two Dromios like the shifty scallies you see hanging round the city centre offering to park your car for a quid.40
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."41
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).