1990

Murray Bramwell talks with the State Theatre Company’s Simon Philips about their latest production, The Comedy of Errors, which opens next Saturday.

Simon Phillips is in rehearsal mode. It is well after six o’clock and the afternoon session has only just finished. Wandering barefoot back to his office for the interview, Phillips is looking weary. Gradually as actors begin appearing, it dawns on him that there is another rehearsal set for seven. A less genial soul might have got tetchy but Phillips is unfazed. The questions begin and immediately he’s comfortably on his mark.

With the ambitious Marat/Sade completed, State is straight into Shakespeare. This year’s choice -The Comedy of Errors.”I always wanted to have a bash at this very early comedy,” Phillips observes cheerily, “There is a naivete and crankiness in it that allows you great freedom.”

He also notes that since State has a “great history” of staging Shakespeare, several possible choices had been already performed in recent years. “Also, I wanted to do a comedy. But because I wanted to err on the entertaining side of things this year- 1990 needs to be a bit buoyant- I decided against one of those comedies where you don’t really know whether it’s a comedy or not. So it ended up as a toss-up between Comedy of Errors and Love’s Labour’s Lost.”

Generally regarded as Shakespeare’s first play, The Comedy of Errors is based on Plautus’s old Roman crowd-pleaser, The Menaechmi. A giddily plotted tangle of mistaken identity, the play concerns two sets of identical twins. Conveniently bearing the same names, the twin nobles, Antipholus and twin servants, Dromio have been separated by circumstance in the cities of Ephesus and Syracuse. When all four get to be in Ephesus at the same time the complications really get hectic.

“I like the fact that it is such self-conscious farce,” Phillips explains, “the unlikeliness is stretched to the limit. Usually farce annoys me intensely – I just want the people to put on their clothes, come out of the cupboard and tell one another the truth ! This one establishes such an outrageous premise from the beginning that all that stuff doesn’t matter too hoots.”

“In a way I have highlighted the fact that it is improbable. Once you have got that out of the way you can look at what is the really interesting part of the play which is the `what-if’ aspect. In among the slapstick, the fun and games and basic identity confusion, in the guise of giving the audience a good laugh, it asks` what if you thought your husband was doing this ?’ `What if such and such happened ?’ It really plays with the idea of identity- characters have a sense of who they are and instead of being recognised for that, they are recognised as people they are not.”

“We are fascinated by the idea of twinning- what if two people are so alike no one can tell them apart, what would that imply ? It’s a bit like asking what if you were invisible – it explodes people’s imaginations and I like that. We think metaphorically about twins and our duality as individuals. We think of our shadow, that other self, as a way to explain our contradictions. Then, when we look at the confusion identicality causes in the husband and wife relationships and the attitude towards the women, there is a sense of the complexity of the themes washing away at the edges of the slapstick.”

In setting the production Simon Phillips has moved away from the Commedia Dell’Arte conventions frequently associated with the play. Instead he and designer Shaun Gurton looked to the Surrealists and, particularly the painter Rene Magritte. With their dry, matter-of-fact style Magritte’s works are like worried dreams, assembling familiar objects in unfamiliar settings. That combination of the improbable and the mundane was what Phillips was after.

“Magritte was right at the heart of the business of asking people to re-look at what was under their noses and explore it as a new concept. The Surrealists were also saying that your inspiration can become reality. All this provides a world in which the glorious levity of the play is allowed great freedom but the nightmare element isn’t lost either.”

“With his figures in bowler hats and overcoats in their confined, ambiguous landscapes, Magritte’s society is rigorously uniform and bureaucratic. So when identity confusions occur they are even more cataclysmic. You have a world where everyone looks very much the same and then two people come into it who look exactly the same.”

In recent times productions of The Comedy of Errors have approached the problem of presenting twins in various ways. Sometimes twin actors are used, another more strenuous approach is for two actors to play their own doubles with stand-ins where necessary. A recent television production used special effects to create twin performances from a single Antipholus and a single Dromio.In the State production Geoffrey Rush and Paul Blackwell will play Antipholus and Richard Piper and Dennis Coard, their servants.

“With the Dromios, the idea of using the red clown nose really unified them in an instant. It made them the same person and they stand out as clown figures with clown functions. The Antipholuses are a different issue but we are trying to make them look pretty similar. You can do it in one bold leap and say `OK audiences, suspend your disbelief, these people look the same.’ But we are trying to give them a bit of a hand with it.”

Disbelief won’t be the only thing in suspension. Musical Director Ian McDonald will be performing his original score on a piano hanging from the flies above the stage.

Presentations of Shakespeare are always a challenge for a theatre company. Audiences familiar with the works can have strong views on interpretation, while newcomers can find the language and stage conventions strange and forbidding. I asked Simon Phillips about his approaches to production.

“Not only is Shakespeare much-craved by audiences, he is also much-craved by actors and directors. He is the barometer of our work as well as being rewarding to do. There is no question that you would perform the plays out of duty or because they are on student reading lists. We choose a Shakespeare because he is our favourite.”

“You always approach a play for what springs up for you, what it gives you. I’m not interested in setting out not to offend people who’ve seen a play ten or twelve times before. I am very interested in making it live and breathe excitingly for people who might be experiencing this play for the first time. To do that you bring it to life for yourself and presume, consequently, that it will come to life for people for whom it is a new experience.”

“You would be crippled creatively if took into account the prejudices of individual audience members. Nor should you think-`Dammit, I have to do this
in a clever way because it’s expected of me that I redefine this. You come at it for what it gives you.”

“Usually when I’m directing Shakespeare, the other production I could be directing is at the back of my mind, as well as the film I would make of it. It’s so rich that you really want to do it. He’s the playwright you keep coming back to and these days we can bring our uncluttered sensibilities to bear on what these plays have got to say to us now.”

A knock at the door brings a terse reminder to Phillips that the evening rehearsal is underway. You sense him eagerly gearing up to the task again. But not before fielding one last question – what does he want audiences to get from his production ? A pause, a wry smile and back it comes -“I want the audience to laugh, and, at the last minute, to wonder what they’ve been laughing at. It’s a good rule of comedy and an even better rule of farce. A real character-based comedy probably asks these things along the way but with farce they suddenly bleed into the consciousness as the play concludes.”

“Twin Identity Crisis” The Advertiser, April 21, , 1990.p.10