The Comedy Of Errors
While Americans are quite good at interpreting The Bard of Avon, the Brits have had several generations more of experience to draw on, which is why it’s imperative that American artists of all stripes go to see Brit imports when they come our way (including those fabulous National Theatre Live presentations a half-dozen times a year at various off-beat movie houses).
The Globe Theatre (until recently under the direction of Mark Rylance) has as part of its mandate a responsibility to texturally discover hidden pockets of understanding, amid the knowledge that today’s audiences are less interested in museum-quality renditions of Shakespeare and his contemporaries than in responding to those ideas that best reflect the current times.
So, this new production of “Comedy of Errors,” one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, is such a delight. Director Rebecca Gatward has found the farcical foundation of the plot taken from ancient Greece (the same sources that produced the 1937 Rodgers & Hart musical, “Boys From Syracuse) and played them fast and furious, to much hilarity.
Set in a mish-mash of contemporary times and early Byzantine Greek Orthodox Christianity, the eight talented actors (all of whom play musical instruments and sing, as well as being well-versed in Elizabethan diction) take on at the very least two different characterizations, save two. This accounts for the two Antipholus’ (Syracuse and Epheus) being played by the same actor (Bill Buckhurst) and the two Dromios (also of Syracuse and Epheus), played with great energy by short and funny Fergal McElheron; the extremely amusing double-playing of the Abbess of the local nunnery as well as a big-time hooker who knows her audience, by Emma Pallant; Cornelius Booth as the doomed strayer into enemy lands, Egeon, and Dr. Pinch; and the solo-character work of Dana Garland as the put-upon wife of Antipholus of Epheus, Luciana, as well as Laura Rodgers as her unwed sister, Adriana.
Played on a small unit set in the extraordinarily comfortable Broad Stage at Santa Monica Community College, the comedy was rip-roaring in two acts, slightly over two hours long, with great big guffaws spilling from the audience onto the stage at the antics of the cast.
In sort: Twenty-five years earlier, Egeon of Syracuse was separated during a fierce storm from his wife, one of his twin sons and one of his sons’ body slaves. Now he is searching the known world (read: Aegean Sea) for the lost wife and child. Not knowing that, hey!, both sons are currently in Epheus (don’t ask!), so are the two slaves, Dromio, and (gasp!) the wife, none of whom drowned at sea.
So, originality was not the point of this play, but rather reworking old stories from the Roman playwright, Plautus, “Menaechmi” and “Amphitryon.” What Ms. Gatward and company have accomplished is to take overly-familiar tropes and re-work them, using cleverness and intelligence to take a silly, most-improbable tale and making us believe it.
The simple set and costume design of Liz Cooke makes this mash-up fun and enviable. The music direction and compositions of Alex Silverman are of no one particular period, thus fitting right in to the time it is placed (now and then).
A joy to see. I haven’t laughed this loudly and often for a long time.
See it.