Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors is not an easy play to perform. His puns are always difficult for modern audiences and in this play there are long passages consisting of little else. The opening scene is particularly hard to follow. Egeon, a merchant from Syracuse, describes in a largely uninterrupted monologue how he managed to lose his wife and one each from two sets of male twins at sea, while floating off himself with the other halves, eventually mislaying them, too. Then the two pairs of twins have to appear on stage and be credibly confusable. Most importantly, the performance has to be funny, which is not as straightforward as it seems, given that the author serves up the same joke with only limited variations for two and a half hours.
With these problems in mind, the Royal Shakespeare Company comes away with something close to full marks. The bawdy double meanings are explained with explicit gestures and imaginative props. Egeon's rhyme of an ancient mariner is illuminated with puppets and a dumb show put on by the chorus characters. The twins look astonishingly similar. By the interval a man sitting behind me had not yet figured out if there really were two of each Antipholus and Dromio. Even if the audience hadn't understood it all, they roared with laughter and stood to applaud when the curtain fell. We were all happy to overlook Shakespeare's many absurdities, such as why twins have the same name, and how it is that, coming from different cities, they wear identical clothes.
Some scenes relied a little too heavily on slapstick for my liking. As director, Nancy Meckler invests her cast with a tremendous and infectious sense of fun. They rush around with great exuberance. There are times when the performance seems scarcely under control, and the screech-ing and whooping become too much. The supporting members of the cast are, unfortunately, better at clowning than acting. But it is the audience's view that counts, and they loved the whole thing.
Meckler's is certainly an attractive production. Ephesus is a lively city where musicians, street vendors, whores and freaks swirl about. Red-coated officers are everywhere in this police state, where a chap can be arrested and sentenced to death just for carrying a Syracusan identity card. The costumes have a hint of the 19th century and a whiff of the Aegean about them; the sea is ever present in sound effects and in masts and sails on stage.
In a circular open set, a simple sheet serves as a door during the pivotal scene in which Antipholus of Ephesus is locked out by his wife, who is dining with a man whom she erroneously supposes to be her husband. The jealous husband and his merchant friends pick up the hapless Dromio (the wrong one, naturally) and use him headfirst as a battering ram. Both Jonathan Slinger and Forbes Masson, playing his twin, are short and crowned with chaotic waves of red hair. The effect of slamming Dromio's ginger head into a mercifully soft door is hilarious. Both men have an excellent sense of comedy and I would be hard pushed to distinguish between their two performances.
There is slightly more to choose between Joe Dixon as the Syracusan Antipholus and Christopher Colquhoun as his counterpart from Ephesus, though both are well matched in build, hair and beard. Dixon is a somewhat camper edition, arms and hands moving like branches in the wind when expressing dismay, which is most of the time. He is very good at drawing the audience into the play, addressing his lines directly to the stalls. Colquhoun is more aloof. He exudes the authority of a man at the top of his city's social order, and as the world around him goes mad he greets it with fury, in contrast to his twin's amused bewilderment.
Matching the twins' comic talent, Suzanne Burden is superb as Colquhoun's jealous wife, ranting about his infidelity, and pouncing on him when at last she discovers the wayward philanderer at large in the town. Too bad that she has jumped on the wrong man. Burden and Sinead Keenan, playing her sister, draw out an interesting dialogue about how women should relate to men, which in its sensi-tivity seems centuries ahead of its time. All six actors speak their lines with great clarity, evidently aware how easy it would be to lose the audience's comprehension or attention. Richard Cordery also does well delivering Egeon's long opening exposition and the rather leaden lines of explanation that tie up all the loose ends at the play's conclusion.
With such problematic material, Meckler may have felt that she had to select between going well over the top and the risk that it might fall flat. It is difficult to quarrel with her choice.
Booking on 0870 609 1110 until 29 October
