For The Comedy of Errors, John Napier transformed the permanent set into a contemporary, cluttered Turkish market; Aegeon was clearly in the rag trade, and garments festooned the balconies; the balcony of Adriana's house overlooked this market; the Porpentine and the Tiger were bars in the market, complete with a group to provide a backing for Guy Woolfenden's interpolated musical numbers. Again and again, a scene would stop for a song based on fragments of the text at that point, or simply on doggerel supplied for the occasion. Adriana and Luciana had a duet, 'A man is master of his liberty', Antipholus of Syracuse a solo based on 'Am I in earth'; a large-scale ensemble illustrated his

There's not a man I meet but doth salute me
As if I were their well-acquainted friend

which turned into a nightmare of illusions; Pinch's exorcisms were built up into an even longer ensemble; both Dromios had extended numbers, one to illustrate the feeble jokes about Time and baldness, the other to elaborate on the beatings he receives. Although these numbers appeared to derive from the text itself, they in fact had the effect of superimposing one medium on another.

Trevor Nunn rightly says that the play works 'when it genuinely uplifts us, when it makes us feel better'. The RSC's previous celebrated version (1962-72, directed by Clifford Williams) achieved exactly that, but there the 'company' feel derived not from generalized routines but from the characters being sharply detailed individuals, reacting to each other and to their situations, out of which the humour arose. Here, the spoken text was again packed with appropriate invention, often very funny, especially the shutting out of Antipholus of Ephesus and the contradictory evidence of the finale, played as a courtroom drama, complete with 'exhibits'; but the sung ensembles tended to merge everyone into puppets, and to blunt personality. These interpolations may have been good for the general morale of the company but they did not seem to me actually to help the performances of its individual members in any way.

Roger Rees's Antipholus of Syracuse, for instance, was potentially excellent, but the director's routines did not help him develop that potential into a complete characterization. Luciana was a bespectacled bookworm, trotting out Renaissance clichés on order and male mastery from her reading, preserved from caricature by Francesca Annis's natural charm and poise. Both she and Judi Dench (Adriana) had suddenly to switch off their performances of the text itself in mid-scene and concentrate on singing; these moments did nothing to support their interpretations; I thought they strained them unnecessarily. Smaller roles stood even less chance of being sustained: the Duke was a Greek military dictator, switching from declarations of the law over a public address system to private sympathy for Aegeon; but he made absolutely nothing of the moment-to-moment bewilderment of the finale, which a succession of very human Dukes in the Williams version made much more of than was allowed to emerge here. Mr Nunn certainly appeared to 'give the audience a really good time', but I thought he did so by imposed routines rather than, as the Williams production did, by emphasizing Shakespeare's distinctive humanizing of his rather inhuman Plautine models.

PRODUCTION:

Adrian Noble • Royal Shakespeare Company • 1983

BACKGROUND:

Noble's RSC production of The Comedy of Errors, his first staging of a fully comedic work, received widely contrasting reviews. Robert Cushman called the attempt "catastrophic," and complained bitterly about Noble's loose treatment of the text and emphasis on physical humor. On the other hand, James Fenton praised the playing, calling it "some of the best verse-speaking we have had at Stratford in recent years." The set was minimal, comprising a white semi-circular shell with black surround, two chairs, and a pit which, while housing the five-piece orchestra, also served as both obstacle and resting place for the actors. The music, written by Nigel Hess, was a potpourri of jazz, ragtime, operetta, and circus music. The costumes, by Ultz, were noted for their bold color and style—the Dromios were presented as Emmett Kelly-style clowns, the Antipholi with bright blue faces, the Courtezan as "Mistress Satan in the flesh," and Luciana as a pink, ruffled clown with a hairdo that was described as everything from a large ice-cream cone to a gigantic phallus. Performances of individual players, while not outstanding, were generally considered competent, and Joseph O'Connor as Egeon received special note for his handling of some of the play's longer speeches. Upon leaving Stratford, the production moved to the Barbican Theatre, London, in 1984.

COMMENTARY: