TheatreguideLondon
www.theatreguidelondon.co.uk
The TheatreguideLondon Review
The Comedy of Errors
Hampstead Theatre Summer 2011 and touring
The Comedy of Errors is a very funny play, and any production will generate laughter. But this staging by Ed Hall's all-male Propeller company has fewer than it should.
'Dying is easy,' someone is reputed to have said, 'Comedy is hard.' Hall's actors work very hard at being funny, and that of course is death to comedy.
Farce requires either the illusion of effortless spontaneity or choreographed precision that lets us enjoy the almost acrobatic expertise of the players.
Watching the actors consciously pushing for the laughs, especially when, for all their undoubted talent, they are not natural clowns, means that not only do the laughs not come, but we're slightly embarrassed for them – think of how you feel when a stand-up comic has adequate material but is dying onstage.
Everything is just a little bit off. When the onstage musicians punctuate each joke with a rim shot or trumpet blast, they're a split second too late.
As the actors rush about being comical, you can almost see them counting '...two, three, four. Turn. Double-take. Wait for laugh.' And when the laugh doesn't come, there's the brief flash of confusion and panic in their eyes.
Of course some of it works. The material is just too good to fail completely. (Does anyone need a reminder? Two sets of twins, separated as children, end up in the same city and keep getting mistaken for each other.)
As the visiting Antipholus, Dugald Bruce-Lockhart does a nice line in confusion and frustration, and Robert Hands makes his brother's wife a panto dame to good comic effect. Richard Frame and Jon Trenchard pull off some of their pratfalls and physical gags as the twin Dromios.
But there's just too much a sense of the wrong actors and wrong director, doing their best but out of their element, trying too hard at what ought to look easy.
Gerald Berkowitz
Return to TheatreguideLondon home page.
| Buy this title at AMAZON.COM |
Review - Comedy of Errors - Propeller at Hampstead 2011