Reviews 2016
Reviews 2016
✭✭✭✩✩
by William Shakespeare, adapted and directed by Bruce Dow
Randolph Academy, Annex Theatre, Toronto Fringe Festival, Toronto
June 29-July 10, 2016
Bruce Dow’s adaptation seeks to uncover the serious side of Shakespeare’s early farce. His best idea is to use dozens of mirrors to emphasize the theme of identity in this tale of two sets of long-lost identical twins. More problematic is adding Death itself as a character (Matthew Barker) who plays small roles and interjects unnecessary remarks about death drawn from many sources – from other plays by Shakespeare to W.S. Gilbert to Robert Frost and Jean Cocteau.
Death is a presence in Shakespeare’s comedy that most directors tend to ignore. There is a death sentence in Ephesus against all foreigners including the father (Naomi Ngebulana) of the two Antipholi (Samantha Jamieson and Sabrina Shallop), who in turn believes his wife (Faly Mevamanana) is dead. But Dow’s idea of giving the character Death lines from other works only proves that death is much discussed in the arts rather than that Shakespeare emphasizes it in this play. Dow’s recherché new title comes from Jean Cocteau’s film Orphée (1950), where Heutebise says: “Les miroirs sont les portes par lesquelles la mort vient et va. Du reste, regardez-vous toute votre vie dans un miroir, et vous verrez la mort travailler, comme des abeilles dans une ruche de verre” (“Mirrors are doors through which the dead come and go. Look in a mirror every day and you will see it working like bees in a glass hive.”). Death quotes the line in English in the play. It’s a great line but whereas the film does show the passage from one world to the next through mirrors, Dow does not show any such action in the play.
Given that the character is not inherent to Shakespeare’s play, as the plot’s complexity increases, the less Dow gives Death to do and the more superfluous Death’s presence becomes. The performances of the fourth-year Randolph Academy students are enthusiastic but quite uneven. Two standouts in this gender-neutral cast, however, are Naomi Ngebulana, who is quite moving as Aegon, the father who believes he has lost both his sons and his wife, and Sabrina Shallop as Antipholus of Syracuse who displays great sensitivity to Shakespeare’s language both in technique and interpretation.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is based on my review for NOW magazine from 2016-06-30.
Photo: Sabrina Shallop as Antipholus of Syracuse facing Samantha Jamieson as Antipholus of Ephesus. ©2016 Darlene Spencer.
For tickets, visit http://fringetoronto.com/fringe-festival/shows.
2016-06-30
A Glass Hive, aka The Comedy of Errors