[In the excerpt below, Smallwood applauds Tim Supple's 1996 production of The Comedy of Errors, maintaining that it was straightforward and “attentive” to Shakespeare's language. Smallwood additionally praises the performances of the actors as well as the effectiveness of the musical accompaniment.]

Tim Supple's version of The Comedy of Errors, which opened (prior to a national and international tour) at The Other Place in Stratford in June came from a world of Shakespeare production altogether different from Ian Judge's. Curious, therefore, that this was the first time the RSC had offered the play since Judge's own main-stage production in 1990, when one actor played both Antipholuses and one both Dromios, creating an evening of slick and brilliant theatrical razzmatazz in which the romance of the play's ending was entirely destroyed by the need to resolve (through the use of doppelgängers) the technical problems created by the doubling. Supple's reading of the piece was infinitely simpler. It presented the play in an unchanging set (designed by Robert Innes Hopkins) of a brick floor backed by a wall with central double doors, a window with a grille, and a bell in a niche above—the simplest of suggestions of a sunlit square in Greece or Turkey. As one entered the theatre one encountered an elderly man dressed in a dirty, ragged cloak and chained to a grid in the centre of the floor, alternately slumped in despair or pacing in anguish and frustration to the limit of his chain. The sound of breaking waves could be heard in the distance, and as 7.30 approached the music that would accompany the production began faintly, hauntingly on that Turkish equivalent of the lute, the ‘ud; then the bell rang sharply, the old man stood up, and, accompanied by a gaoler carrying a great sword and a blindfold, in strode Leo Wringer's crisply dapper Solinus, a black man in a white, high-buttoned military suit, a whiff of Caribbean dictatorship about him, to order, not without a touch of contempt, ‘Merchant of Syracusa, plead no more.’

The opening dialogue made clear the principles upon which the rest of the production would be based. It was straightforward, sharply focused, and attentive to the language, and it neither sought, nor needed, to extract from Aegeon's narrative any cheap laughter at the succession of unhappy coincidences that had befallen him. The power of the story was conveyed to us partly by the simplicity with which Christopher Saul's Aegeon told it, but more by the intensity of the listening from Solinus, who was transfixed by what he heard, his attitude changing from the terse and official to the personal and committed as the account progressed. There was no padding, no pantomime pauses and double-takes, just a grief-worn old man telling of his journeyings to despair, punctuated by sad and sympathetic sounds from the little collection of middle eastern instruments—‘ud, zarb, balafan, sitar, with a violin and female singer—that brought a quality of eeriness, of strangeness and mystery, to the play. The use of music to underscore Shakespearian dialogue so often has the depressing effect of putting a generalized emotional wash over everything that the success of Adrian Lee's accompaniment here is worth remark. It derived partly from its spareness, and from the unfamiliar quality of instrumental sounds, but chiefly from the fact that musicians and actors had rehearsed together from the start, language and sound growing into organic unity. Only once, at the end, did the music intrude. The intensity of the play's conclusion was so fully conveyed to the audience that we needed to make our contribution to the event, to make the play and the space ours, through applause, long before the singer had concluded her valedictory vocalizing. It was an odd failure of judgement on the part of a director who otherwise conveyed his respect and affection for the play with unstinted tact.

He costumed the production in modern dress, the Antipholuses in pale linen suits and suede shoes, their similarity carried most tellingly in identical curly brown hair-styles and jutting little beards. Their Dromios both wore baggy black shorts and t-shirts, but it was Duke Vincentio's formula for blurring identity, shaven heads, that most effectively persuaded us into believing in the confusions. Adriana, in an elegant modern suit with a boldly slit skirt, contrasted sharply with her sister Luciana, modest to the point of austerity (if not dowdiness) in long-skirted grey. And for once the Courtesan (Maeve Larkin) and Dr Pinch (Leo Wringer) remained within the realms of credibility, her red high-heeled shoes being the principal, rather innocently transparent, signal of her professional status, while he, in shiny black tight-fitting suit and black hat, and brandishing a Bible (or book of spells), combined a sense of the evangelical preacher from the southern United States with a hint of the voodoo magician in a way that was both witty and disturbing.

There have, no doubt, been productions of The Comedy of Errors in which the central scenes of mistaken identity were more boisterously farcical. Not that the big set pieces—the visiting Antipholus's bewildered response to Adriana's recriminatory tirade, his Dromio's fear of sexual possession by the kitchen maid, the increasing pace and panic of the final arrest and asylum sequence—were not splendidly funny. But they were played against a strong sense of the deeper issues being explored in the play. The complaints of Sarah Cameron's brittle, ill-at-ease Adriana derived from genuine and painful bewilderment and hurt at the loss of her husband's love. Thusitha Jayasundera brought to Luciana a quiet, self-contained intelligence, an apparently knowing caution about emotional commitment and the ‘troubles of the marriage-bed’ (2.1.27), that gave the role a stillness and depth that contrasted tellingly with the rawness of her sister's anxieties and vulnerabilities. To her brother-in-law's ardent wooing she responded with a firm and dignified, though wistful, rejection. His hopeful eagerness for a kiss, which she seemed about to allow but at the last moment rejected, left her with tears in her eyes—for her sister, but also for herself and for him. Even at the end, the impediments gone, she remained cautious and thoughtful, the feminist conscience of the play, uncertain about commitment. Robert Bowman's Antipholus of Syracuse responded to the blandishments of Ephesus with a beautifully poised mixture of innocent delight and wary bafflement. His distrust (aided by the plaintive, otherworldly music, reinforcing his suspicions of magic and witchcraft) could be seen gradually developing into frightened uncertainty about the stability of his own identity (‘If everyone knows us and we know none …’ (3.2.160)), forcing him into close alliance with his Dromio (Dan Milne) in a relationship that was always, and quite rightly, more trusting, and fonder, than that of their twins. His voice, lighter than his Ephesian brother's and with a faint crack to it, gave him a gentle, hesitant, slightly fey quality, very different from his twin's solid, four-square bass. Simon Coates's Antipholus of Ephesus found all the harshness of the part, his resentments fierce, his anger towards his wife bitter and self-righteous, his rage with his Dromio (Eric Mallett) hard and unamused. Funny noises from the band's percussion more or less persuaded us to laugh at his brother's slapstick attacks on his Dromio, but the energy with which the Ephesian Antipholus hit his servant made that impossible, the audience's mounting distaste on several occasions seeming to shame the band into silence as the blows rained down.

The production, then, treated the play with deep respect and with a thoughtful, affectionate delight in the story it had to tell. The effect of all this was most marked, and most welcome, at the play's ending. Aemilia—who last time at Stratford, in a hat like a double lampshade, had been the last in a succession of absurd caricatures—was here, in Ursula Jones's performance, a figure of quiet dignity and gentle authority, costumed simply in a nun's habit. The revelations that accompanied her arrival had a feeling of the miraculous about them, giving to the reunions something of a sacred quality. From here, it was clear, the route to the restoration of Sebastian to Viola, of Marina to Pericles, of Hermione to Leontes, was straight and direct. The ending was not, however, all unalloyed joy—any more than it is in those later plays. The wonder and delight had a touch of muted uncertainty, of hesitation about daring to believe, that gave them a profound seriousness. Much was still to be understood, much to be forgiven. Precisely what had happened between brother and sister-in-law at Adriana's dinner? He had certainly appeared after it in a state of bemused exhaustion and now, at the end, its memory cast its little shadow over the long-yearned-for reunion with his brother. And how much did Adriana deserve the Abbess's energetic telling off that left her publicly humiliated, the Courtesan sniggering in the background? Precisely how culpable was the Ephesian Antipholus's friendship with the Courtesan? Adriana winced and glared at him as he thanked her rival for his ‘good cheer’; he registered his wife's pain and revealed his own embarrassment and shame. Theirs had been the first embrace in the reunion sequence, the long stare of uncertain wonder between the brothers broken by Antipholus of Ephesus's energetic ‘No, I say nay to that’ (5.1.372) as Adriana was about to repeat her dinnertime confusion between them. He held her in his arms tentatively, awkwardly; these two, one knew, had a lot of bridges to mend. The two pairs of brothers finally achieved their embraces after Aegeon's unfastened chains had clattered to the floor, an event that followed hard upon the Goldsmith's last little moment of fuss about his chain. Then, and most movingly, those two elegantly dressed young men in turn took their ragged, exhausted father, just rescued from death's door, in their arms and Aemilia began her final speech of blessing, receiving the embraces of her sons as she declared her heavy burden finally delivered. The verbal benedictions done, she blessed everyone manually as they knelt in front of her before making their exits to the gossips' feast: the Duke, benevolent and eager; Aegeon returning her long, hesitant gaze before going in, without an embrace—thirty-three years of separation, and a nun's habit, clearly requiring a great deal more thought on both sides; Adriana compelled, in spite of protest, to accompany the Courtesan; Luciana, silent through the scene, once moving close to Antipholus of Syracuse but forced away again by the pressure of the scene's events and now departing alone; an unwilling Balthazar, his financial obsessions and sartorial vulgarity strongly suggesting that abbeys are unfamiliar territory; and Aegeon's erstwhile guard, respectfully removing his cap and leaving his sword at the door—an exquisitely detailed and thoughtful sequence of exits. The two pairs of twins were thus left to face the future, Antipholus of Ephesus much less certain that he regarded it with enthusiasm than his brother—for he'd not been searching for anyone, anywhere, and life for him had been just fine until this appalling day. He watched his brother kiss his servant Dromio on the lips, a kiss that rendered thanks for loyalty and patience and friendship through years of wandering, but also marked the end of all that; for, now that it was no longer to be just the two of them, things would never be quite the same again. The Ephesian Dromio watched that kiss too and seemed to will his master to perceive the need for symmetry. His Antipholus did, indeed, think about the possibility for a moment or two; but there was no way that he could change so quickly—or that this director would be tempted along so sentimental a road. Perceiving the unkissed Dromio's disappointment, Antipholus of Syracuse rescued the situation by instructing his servant to ‘Embrace thy brother there’, a piece of sensitivity to the text that was typical of so much in the production. And so the two shaven-headed, bare-kneed sufferers of the play's blows and buffets, real and metaphorical, were left alone to discover from each other, with poignant hopefulness, that after all they were sweet-faced youths, and to scurry off, hand in hand, after the rest. And it was all done in precisely two hours, without fuss and without self-indulgence, by constant alertness and sensitivity to the play's language and delight in the wonders of the story it has to tell. A pity we weren't allowed to applaud it quite as soon as we wanted to.