[In the following excerpted review, Smallwood describes Kathryn Hunter's The Comedy of Errors performed at the Globe Theatre in 2000 as crude, patronizing, and, “in every sense, a sell out.”]

Kathryn Hunter was ‘Master of Play’ for the Globe's The Comedy of Errors, Tim Carroll ‘Master of Verse’, and Liz Cooke ‘Master of Design’. The setting was vaguely Turkish, with middle eastern instruments accompanying the action from above, and turbaned men and veiled women peopling the world of Ephesus in a potentially interesting way. There were merchants of all sorts, too, plying their wares between the scenes, but it was the fish merchants who began to give the intentions of the production away, their special line in plastic fish proving irresistible as missiles both on stage and between stage and groundlings. The plastic fish epitomized the project. Doomed to failure before it started by the alluring but always fatal decision to double the Antipholuses and the Dromios, the production sold out, as so much of the Globe's work seems so sadly to do, to the lowest common denominator of groundling taste. Marcello Magni is undoubtedly a very accomplished mime artist, but as a Shakespearian actor he is not an easy taste to acquire. His pillar climbing, mugging, and audience molesting were in the vein we have experienced earlier at the Globe, but as both Dromios he here had much longer to indulge them. To cast in a role for which the basic requirement is sharpness and dexterity in verbal repartee an actor whose command of spoken English is at best precarious is openly to declare that one's primary interest is not in the play's verbal texture. This was shown at its most blatant in the dialogue (2.2) between Dromio and Antipholus about time and baldness, here spoken with scarcely a word decipherable while, to the screeching delight of the audience, a game of badminton was played. Whatever became of the blue pencil if a director, or even a Master of Play, feels such contempt for a scene? No sense of the mystery of Ephesus ever emerged, and attempts to produce it were limited to such infantile moments as having a group of Ephesians sweeping the stage suddenly freeze in a bending posture holding their brushes out behind them, or the musicians in the gallery appearing in white plastic animal heads, like so many Harveys.

The acting was in the same vein of crudeness, though Robert Pickavance did attempt, in spite of groundling efforts to push in the opposite direction, to offer a serious account of Egeon's griefs and he was supported in the endeavour by Martin Turner's Solinus. Vincenzo Nicoli was not without a certain goofy charm as Antipholus, but it was at best a wooden performance, with no real distinction offered between the brothers. Yolanda Vazquez gave us one of those caricature Adrianas, standing aside from the role, as it were, and guying all its emotional extremes. Jules Melvin (a female actor) began reasonably well as Luciana, but her brother-in-law's love-verses (heavily underscored by the violin as a hint to the audience that this should be taken more solemnly than the rest of the knockabout with which they were being patronized) apparently turned her head, for she took to putting on an antic disposition and smoking a hookah in imitation of the National's Helen of Troy. Any production, certainly any stage production, of The Comedy of Errors that doubles the twins must inevitably destroy the play's romance ending (the prototype of Twelfth Night and The Winter's Tale) by substituting for the audience's wonder at the final miracle mere curiosity as to how the self-imposed problem will be solved. But here, just as we had come to terms with the doppelgangers and felt relief that, at last, the Abbess, at least, had been treated seriously, we had the annihilation of one of the most exquisite exit sequences in Shakespeare. Off went Antipholus and his double, but off, too, went the stand-in Dromio, leaving Magni on stage alone. The Abbess had left a cross behind at her exit and he dressed it in his coat and danced with it a little. ‘I see by you I am a sweet-faced youth’, he said to his dummy's facelessness and then reached round through the further sleeve of the dummy's coat and began to fondle himself. For the play's final distillment of fraternal reciprocity, of identity through relationship, was substituted this image of self-indulgence, of self-pleasuring, this—but in the fifty-third year of Survey's august history I had better not be the first to use the obvious monosyllable for this swanking piece of vulgarity that provided the perfect finale to the production. The performance I saw was packed, with a long queue for returns, and it was greeted with huge applause, milked to an extent I have rarely witnessed in a series of encored jigs. It was, in every sense, a sell-out.