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The Comedy Of Errors
Barbican Theatre Winter 2000-01

Occasionally - only occasionally - being an experienced theatre-goer proves a handicap, as you sit with an audience being mildly amused and thus satisfied by a play that you know, from past productions, could be so very much better, so that the audience is being cheated without even realizing it.

That's my experience of the Royal Shakespeare Company's Comedy of Errors, newly transferred to London from Stratford. It has its laughs, mainly when the actors get out of the way and let the play shine through, but director Lynne Parker and her cast have done so very much less than they could have with the sure-fire material Shakespeare gave them.

This is the one about the two sets of twins separated as children so that one half of each pair, master and servant, are roaming the world in search of their brothers. They wander into the town where the brothers live and are immediately mistaken for them (and, eventually, the resident brothers for the newcomers), leading to all sorts of comic confusion.

Of course, as with all great farces, if anyone stopped for an instant to ask the obvious questions - in this case, the visitors are looking for their brothers, and might be expected to guess they had found them - the whole thing would fall apart. So, as with all great farces, things have to move so quickly, and the laughs come so constantly, that they don't get a chance to ask and we don't get a chance to notice they haven't asked.

I've seen the RSC do the play successfully as whirlwind farce, as surreal absurdism, even as rock musical, and know how hilarious it can be, and how well they can do it. But Lynne Parker doesn't seem to have made up her mind what she wanted to do with the play, so it changes tone, style and comic mode every few minutes.

Some bits are Three Stooges-type slapstick, some are choreographed Commedia, some in silent film comic style, some in the stylization of musical comedy without the songs. No sooner does a bit get going and start to develop some comic rhythm or momentum than it is dropped for a new style.

And none of the styles is done with any real flair. There's a chase scene straight out of silent comedies, with people running back and forth across the stage and new sight gags added with each crossing, but it's almost leisurely when it should be frenetic. The sure-fire set piece in which the visiting Dromio describes a woman in terms of a globe is, rightly enough, done as a Music Hall turn, but with no snap or energy. We laugh, because the bit is indeed funny, but the production gets in its way rather than enhancing it.

Meanwhile, whole chunks of the play that are not obviously funny are played straight, instead of being invested with comic business, leading to long stretches of low energy from which the comic energy must be strenuously rebuilt.

The two servant brothers (Ian Hughes and Tom Smith) make some effort to suggest similarities of appearance and style, to give some credibility to the confusions, and Hughes, as the visiting one, works up some frantic comic energy. But the two masters don't resemble each other at all in looks or manner. The resident Antipholus (Anthony Howell) is given no personality at all, while the visitor (David Tennant) changes character from moment to moment, now country bumpkin, now suave playboy.

The resident brother's wife (Emily Raymond) can't decide - or hasn't been told by her director - whether she's a comic shrew or a misunderstood figure of pathos, while Jacqueline Defferary as her sister is a blank. For no particular reason, the Duke is given a Jewish accent and the actress playing a character described as monstrously fat is slim. In ever more frantic attempts to paste some visual humour into the play, one minor character is played as a Cossack, another does a sand dance, and there's a brief glimpse of a panto camel.

Yes, the audience laughed, and those who had never seen it before probably came away mildly satisfied. But it could have been so much better.

Gerald Berkowitz

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Review - The Comedy of Errors - RSC Barbican 2000