1990

The Comedy of Errors
by William Shakespeare
State Theatre Company
Playhouse, April 1990

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

The Comedy of Errors might have been entitled The Comedy of Preposterous Situations. I mean, really. Twin boys are born in Ephesus and, at the same time in the same household, twin servants- both pairs identical. Then, in some nautical kerfuffle both sets of twins are separated and, before you know it, they have grown up in different cities unaware of each other’s existence. How both lots got to be called Antipholus and Dromio is never adequately accounted for. Instead, it is better to spend your energy trying to keep up with things when all four start gadding around Syracuse at the same time getting into more confusing permutations than most playwrights would think was decently reasonable.

Shakespeare didn’t dream his story up -he got the idea from Plautus’s comedy of mistaken identicality, The Menaechmi- but, The Comedy of Errors, generally agreed to be the great man’s first play, has all his verbal and dramatic signatures. It is also, as the State Theatre Company’s current production amply demonstrates, a genuine hoot.

This time, director Simon Phillips and designer Shaun Gurton have taken surreal motifs from the Rene Magritte paintings of the twenties and thirties . Cheerful cloudscapes hang in the blue, gigantic fruit and veg descend without portent and everything is framed with satirically prim fake curtains. Human figures in black bowlers and longcoats parachute in with umbrellas and move about in obsessive formation like pavlovian commuters. Everyone here is a cog in place, unprepared for the chaos of having two items with the same barcode.

In the prologue Bob Hornery as Egeon makes a conscientious attempt to explain his predicament and the complicated tale of the twins’ separation (complete with this-piggy-went-to -market-this-stayed-home finger gestures) but it is a difficult task as a front curtain monologue, especially when he is talking to the
disembodied voice of the Duke like Mork to Orson. The first scene,it seems, is unduly sacrificed in order to lift the curtain on the huge cloud-lined box-set revealing MD Ian McDonald nonchalantly suspended with his grand piano twenty feet above the action.

Phillips’ astute casting becomes evident with Paul Blackwell as Antipholus of Syracuse. Fussy, fidgetty, eccentric and increasingly perplexed, Blackwell’s Antipholus is somewhere between Stan Laurel and the young J.Alfred Prufrock. As his much-pummelled Dromio, Richard Piper gives us equally splendid clowning. The deadpan use of Bozo-red hair for the Antipholi and red noses for the Dromios works well with the formality of the costuming. Even better, when Shakespeare is performed in three piece suits instead of ruffles and tights no-one is tempted to flounce and Simon Philips can direct the whole thing like Mack Sennett.

As the Ephesus connection Geoffrey Rush’s Antipholus and other Dromio,Dennis Coard, literally match. And contrast effectively as well. Rush looks suitably unhinged by his mind-corrugating experiences and dark at the Courtesan’s revelations, while Coard usefully complements Piper’s roguish Dromio. The comic absurdity of the confusion is particularly evident when a door rises out of the vast stage like a slice of toast and the boys from Syracuse are presented enjoying Ephesian hospitality while, locked out of their own house, Rush and Coard cool their heels on the footpath. And as for the play’s final scene when all four are finally revealed, it is, so to speak, a complete scream.

As Phillips’ programme notes foreshadow, the play has some not very funny things to say about women. The Dromios have a nasty line in sexual disparagement for instance, but the speeches between Adriana (Jane Menelaus) and her unmarried sister Luciana (Carmel McGlone) sound quite familiar -Adriana asks very reasonable questions about why she has to be `her indoors’ when her husband moves freely about the world, while Luciana makes unconvincing noises on behalf of the meek. Their circumstances are nicely signified later when they make entrances descending in gilded cages.

There is ambiguity,however, in Bronwyn Jones’s otherwise accomplished costuming when Adriana appears to be wearing a wedding veil over her quite emancipated-looking lacy day wear. Also, the costume stereotyping of Luciana as frump and the Courtesan as scarlet woman is too relentless and makes them, misleadingly, ludicrous. Dressed in a bad henna wig and a red vinyl number with great black handprints all over it, it is small wonder Mary-Anne Pitman’s Courtesan seemed so out of kilter in the production.

Overall though, the pacy direction, the visually striking set (abundantly lit by Mark Shelton) Ian McDonald’s aerial ragtime Satie-sounding score and the energy and invention of the ensemble make the production a considerable pleasure. It might be called The Comedy of Errors but in making Shakespeare accessible entertainment Simon Phillips and his company have hardly put a foot wrong.

“Glimmer Twins” The Adelaide Review, No.76, May, 1990, pp.20-1.