Farce And Humanity:
The Comedy of Errors
The Comedy of Errors was performed, presumably by Shakespeare’s company, at Gray’s Inn on 28 December 1594. Was it then a new play? The London theatres were closed, because of a virulent outbreak of the plague, from July 1592 to April 1594, during which time Shakespeare wrote his two narrative poems; he may also have written Errors at that time, ready for performance when the theatres reopened. Errors used to be regarded as an even earlier work, perhaps written for local performance before he left Stratford; but this view reflected a low estimate of the play, and modern performances have shown it to be a brilliant piece of theatrical mechanism; it is hard to see how this could have been achieved without the experience of working in the professional theatre.
Shakespeare’s main source is the Menaechmi by the classical dramatist Plautus; but he made substantial changes. To begin with, he gave the twin masters of the Menaechmi twin servants, thus doubling the potential for confusion and mistaking. Then he moved the setting from Epidamnum to Ephesus, which was famous – or notorious – in the ancient world, and in the Bible, as a centre of witchcraft, so that Antipholus of Syracuse half-expects strange things to happen to him.
But Shakespeare’s most crucial, and most personal, changes modify the tone of his original. He enclosed the central confusions within a framework – the story of Aegeon and his ultimate reunion with his wife and family – taken from a very different kind of story, the legend of Apollonius of Tyre, to which he returned at the end of his career in Pericles. Still more significant, he introduced an element of romance into the mistakings, in the wooing of Luciana by Antipholus of Syracuse, where the language looks forward to his later comedies, and connects with his own love poetry in the Sonnets. Antipholus calls Luciana ‘mine own self’s better part’, a phrase which echoes Shakespeare’s calling his lover ‘the better part of me’ in Sonnets 39 and 74. His interest in twins, both here and in Twelfth Night, may also derive from personal considerations. He was the father of twins, and this may have informed Antipholus of Syracuse’s sense of loss and personal disorientation when separated from his twin:
I to the world am like a drop of water
That in the ocean seeks another drop,
Who falling there to find his fellow forth,
Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself.
So I, to find a mother and a brother,
In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself.
The Comedy of Errors is technically a farce; but one of the most interesting aspects of farce is how painful it often is, how often the audience is invited to laugh at other people’s misfortunes, as in the repeated beating of the Dromios or Adriana’s sense of marital betrayal. But again, Shakespeare has it both ways: the scene in which Adriana pours out her resentment to the wrong Antipholus is a perfect example of comedy of mistaking; but at the same time we feel for her in her unhappiness. So with the play’s treatment of money. Like its Plautine original, Errors takes place in a primarily mercantile society, symbolised by the theatrical props: Antipholus’ bag of gold, and especially the golden chain which leads to so many of the confusions in the second half of the play. And yet the topic of money may serve to indicate the distance that Shakespeare has travelled from his rather inhuman Plautine model, most obviously in the final scene of each play. In Menaechmi, the equivalent of Antipholus of Ephesus offers his wife for sale; Errors ends with the warmth and reconciliation of a multiple family reunion.
Roger Warren
Designing The Comedy of Errors
It is ironic that this play of happenstance and consequences, a precisely written farce, demands that the designer is doubly exacting and makes no human errors. Shakespeare delights in the form and The Comedy of Errors is as fresh as Feydeau and contemporary as Cooney, with just a dash of Joe Orton’s black humour. Comedies of this sort that, on the page, imply intense and precise physicality in the staging, require a design that maps out the action and anticipates the journey times from any given point on the stage to another. Entrances should be a surprise and exits swift. Aesthetically, they also need to take the audience into a familiar but not necessarily realistic world – hyper-reality perhaps, to match the escalating energy of the narrative in performance.
Propeller always tries to bring the sixteenth century closer to the twenty-first by overlaying the footprint of one upon the other and exploiting how Shakespeare’s characters negotiate the timeless human situations he has dealt them. In conceiving our unique world for the story, we had to find for ourselves an island community with its own laws and superstitions; as haunted as Prospero’s island and as potentially volatile as our own on a boozy Saturday night. Ephesus should therefore be a multicultural crossroads where all manner of unlikely folk are ‘washed up’ in all senses of the word and where eating, sex and commerce are the prime preoccupations of its entrapped population.
Scenic design for The Comedy of Errors
Obvious then: a run-down piazza in a run-down port in a Tenerife or Capri lookalike. Stags and Hens, police corruption and black market racketeering are the everyday and anyone can lose themselves in the margarita-fuelled 24/7 holiday spirit. Lookalike–everything looks like it might be the real thing, but it has become a fantasy island. The clothes are an eclectic pan-European mix and the locals merge into the shadows behind aviator sunglasses, under the brims of sombreros.
Costume designs for The Comedy of Errors
Shakespeare’s usual implicit arrangement of three entrances, set into a single upstage tiring house with a central balcony above, is a formula for the scenic architecture that designers ignore at their and the production’s peril. Propeller’s Ephesus mirrored this exact plan so that exits and entrances stretched an entering actor’s journey across the stage, allowing for plenty of time to improvise en route, before building up a dangerous head of steam to make a super-fast exit. Doors themselves rarely play a big part in Shakespeare’s staging, but they are great for farce, of course. So our design of three double-height metal shop front shutters splashed with undecipherable scribble and inset doors that smacked shut with an echoing rattle, helped fuel the production’s urban frenzy.
Michael Pavelka
Music in The Comedy of Errors
Somehow the identity of the ensemble in Propeller’s The Comedy of Errors ended up as a mariachi band. This fitted Edward Hall’s idea that the play be set in a cheesy Spanish holiday island for Brits, where raucous eighties pop anthems and loud football shirts ruled, ok. Mariachi not only suited the company’s instrumental talents – we already played guitar, accordion, violins, brass – but also provided the perfect medium for us to play electronic eighties tunes accoustically, as well as giving the required atmosphere of heat, holidays, hilarity, and hot tempers.
Before the show, the whole company improvised background music in a latin style, including Deve Ser Amor and Bossa Dorado. The second half opened similarly with the Officer singing to a lady in the audience The Girl From Ipanema. Mariachi classics, Cielito Lindo and The Mexican Hat Song introduced Syracuse. And Antipholus of Ephesus’s drunken nights with the Courtesan were accompanied by a brash brass quintet of When The Saints Go Marching In. Gloria Estefan’s
