The Comedy of Errors [at Stratford, Ontario] was partly a musical production with a song at the beginning and the end and bits of singing and dancing along the way, but the text remained intact, even to the extent of all of old Aegeon's lengthy speech in the first scene. In a presentation that did not deny farce and slapstick their rightful place, Mr. Phillips was careful to preserve those wistful touches of loneliness and bewilderment that give the play a perspective beyond the reach of burlesque. The closing song was about identity. The music was Alan Laing's. The words, I suspect, were by Mr. Phillips. The subject sounds an unpromising one for lyrical composition, but in the event, sung movingly by the full cast, the song celebrated, without vulgar sentimentality or pedantic stress, a theme that is woven into the texture of the play.

The setting was the North American West in the late 1800s, yet none of the language nor any of the names were changed. The sea was still close at hand, Aegeon was a merchant of Syracuse, Ephesus was the scene of the action, and Solinus was the Duke of that city. There were a few who found this incongruous and upsetting, but I found that, with the text intact, any discrepancies were superficial and not disturbing. It is less disturbing to the unity of the play to imagine that the Duke of a place called Ephesus appears to be a wealthy rancher, than it would be to find Hoss McGillicudy, boss of the Lazy Cactus near Tombstone, inserted into the text of Shakespeare's play.

The question remains as to why the play should be set in the old West, and I cannot answer it. It may be that Mr. Phillips was being overly clever in attempting to construct a message about appearance and reality by finding an identity between the society of a Greek city and that of another continent where similar bourgeois values and the energies of the nouveaux riches were jeopardizing the brotherhood of man. It is more likely that he was simply having some fun with a play that has asked for that kind of treatment since it was first written. However that may be, the production was the funniest that I have seen, and all the more effective because the funny business was never allowed to get out of hand, and because its serious moments were taken with just the shade of seriousness appropriate to each of them.

A large Conestoga Wagon or Prairie Schooner dominated the center of the stage. Around it cowhands and farmers lounged. Near it Adriana fed her chickens or hung her laundry to dry. Merchants met beside it. This and that Dromio and Antipholus circled it in their various confusions. The Duke pronounced sentence on old Aegeon beneath its shadow, and from it emerged the Abbess, firing a shotgun to end a rousing square dance so that she could begin the series of revelations that conclude the play. The wagon was everything, and no one thing: perhaps a symbol of migration, whether over seas or prairies, and final settlement; perhaps simply a center as versatile as the country store.

It was a triumphant production for the Young Company, full of acrobatic energy, but with the farcical and slapstick bits so crisply timed and adroitly performed that one had the impression of watching some preposterously enjoyable sleight-of-hand. Barry MacGregor, who never seems to put a foot wrong in comedy, exhibited a music hall dexterity as Antipholus of Ephesus, consulting a ponderous gold watch and then flipping it nonchalantly through the air and into his lower waistcoat pocket, juggling a lighted cigar and ending up with it between his teeth, staggering precariously across the stage with a large barrel on his shoulder in an attempt to break down the doors of his occupied home, racing through the forty lines of his speech of explanation to the Duke in about one minute flat without apparently drawing breath. Nicholas Pennell encountered the perpetual bewilderment of Antipholus of Syracuse with a comic stiffness of the upper lip and rigidity of the spine, fighting a losing battle to maintain a crisp punctilio against the withering effects of embarrassment and passion. There was a tempestuous Adriana from Jackie Burroughs, a model, at times almost a caricature, of the frenetic housewife strung out by frustrations, real and imagined. Her sister Luciana was played by Gale Garnett as a prim and proper, bookish maiden, obviously destined for the eternal spinsterhood of the village schoolmarm, but saved by the arrival of Antipholus of Syracuse.

Dromios came and went with astonishing rapidity: Bernard Hopkins and Richard Whelan, from Syracuse and Ephesus respectively, made up to look so much alike that the naked eye could not tell them apart. However, the ear could, because their Unes were so adroitly handled that even someone who did not know the play could understand the growing confusion in Ephesus without being confused. Clarity of line in the midst of a dazzling fluidity of movement, the achievement by director and cast of a kind of choreographed chaos: these qualities made this production definitive of what The Comedy of Errors ought to be on stage, regardless of costume and setting.

PRODUCTION:

Trevor Nunn • Royal Shakespeare Company • 1976

BACKGROUND:

Nunn's musical version of The Comedy of Errors was acclaimed by many critics for its originality, lavish ornamentation and strong, spirited cast. Musical numbers, composed by Guy Woolfenden with lyrics by Nunn, were organized around turning points in the plot and memorable lines, such as Luciana's "A man is master of his liberty" (II. i. 7). Said Irving Wardle of the score, "It does not give you much to hum on the way out, but it supplies a springboard into dramatic song and dance." Roger Warren complained, however, that musical comedy and Elizabethan farce were incompatible, and he argued that "the sung ensembles tended to merge everyone into puppets, and to blunt personality." The production was universally described as stylish, colorful, and rich in comic detail. The market at Ephesus was presented as a modern day tourist trap, complete with novelty shops and vendors hawking straw hats, postcards, souvenirs and T-shirts sporting the name "Ephesus." Minor roles were played as caricatures: the Duke was a Greek generalissimo, while the goldsmith, Angelo's creditor, represented a 1930's American gangster. Noted Wardle, "All this represents no particular time or place, but it is certainly the do-main of comedy." Comic routines were characterized by slapstick, set pieces, and circus gags. Michael Wills and Nickolas Grace, playing the Dromio twins, were especially praised for their acrobatic clowning.

COMMENTARY: