✭✭✭✭✩

by William Shakespeare, directed by Nancy Meckler

Royal Shakespeare Company, Novello Theatre

January 10-28, 2006

I would normally not go out of my way to see THE COMEDY OF ERRORS.  It’s hardly Shakespeare’s best work, consisting really of just a single joke doubled and extended to evening length.  This RSC production at the Novello Theatre (formerly the Strand) was, however, directed by Nancy Meckler, who made “House of Desires” by Sor Juana de la Cruz so exciting last year.  I never have seen so successful a production of this work, one that found depths in it I didn’t think it had.  One key is that she made the carnivalesque atmosphere of fair that begins the play extend throughout the entire action.  Meckler presents Ephesus as a world upside down.  Here nothing matches anything.  Patterns and periods clash in individual costumes.  The Duke of Ephesus’s throne is a barber’s chair.  That this somehow works and is fun rather than seeming just an ill-assorted mishmash is a credit to the keen eye for unifying colour and shape of designer Katrina Lindsay. 

The two sets of identical twins thus come to represent, more than is usually the case, the sense of an order lost that must be restored.  Human action to restore order only leads to more chaos.  Luciana’s speech to Adriana at the start of the play that Adriana should have patience, becomes a key to understanding the play--a stance that looks forward to Shakespeare’s more mature comedies and romances where it is only time that can heal.  Meckler’s second innovation is not to have the characters play out repeated cases of mistaken identity for comedy.  We may laugh, but the characters themselves are genuinely perturbed.  This attitude itself lends greater weight to the play.  Line after line that ordinarily are thrown away in bluster, here make sense and form pre-echoes of Shakespeare’s work to come.

  

            The two Dromios (Jonathan Slinger and Forbes Masson) each a flaming redhead with a high quiff looked and acted almost interchangeable.  In contrast the two Antipholi were sharply differentiated.  Joe Dixon, Antipholus of Syracuse, conjured up the disorientation of being in a dream that rapidly turned to nightmare and madness.  Christopher Colquhoun, Antipholus of Ephesus, was slick and pompous and an argument for how nurture dominates nature. Unlike so many productions of “Errors” that emphasize farce above all else, the play’s ending was genuinely moving in the way that I had thought only the reunion scenes of “Twelfth Night” or “The Winter’s Tale” could be.  It was a fine production that tapped the magic and sense of wonder in the story in a way I’ve never seen before.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in the London Theatre Guide 2006-01-31.

Photo: Forbes Mason and Jonathan Slinger. ©2006 Ellie Kurttz.