It’s something of an obvious choice after all we’ve been through over the past two years, The Comedy of Errors. This one from Glenn Elston’s Australian Shakespeare Company is the second so far this year, with Bell Shakespeare’s coming to Melbourne in July. We can imagine the thought process behind the programming, too: something light, something silly, to take our mind off restriction and lockdown. It isn’t a sustainable approach for a crippled arts sector, this “don’t look up, down, around or under” programming philosophy, but it works wonders in the short term.
Because Shakespeare’s earliest comedy, deliberately evoking the plot mechanics of Plautus and then doubling them for anarchy’s sake, is one of his purest entertainments, simple in effect and ingenious in design. It’s about two sets of identical twins, Antipholus (Peter Houghton) and Dromio (Thomas Pidd) of Ephesus, and Antipholus (Hugh Sexton) and Dromio (Syd Brisbane) of Syracuse – why they have the same names is a detail Shakespeare buries in a long speech of exposition at the beginning – and the utter chaos that ensues when they all unwittingly cross paths.
One of the Antipholuses has a harried wife, Adriana (Elizabeth Brennan) and an amorous sister-in-law, Luciana (Madeleine Somers) who catches the eye of the other Antipholus and brings about a deal of marital strife. The gender dynamics are straight out of commedia dell’arte, via the medieval English Punch and Judy tradition, and are probably the one thing we have to studiously ignore these days. Certainly, the delicious gender experiments of the later works, from As You Like It and Twelfth Night all the way to Antony and Cleopatra, feel a long way off.
What makes the thing so delightful, and the reason it is such a perennial favourite, is Shakespeare’s sustained use of dramatic irony, where the audience is in on the joke at the expense of the characters. It means the actors get to play every iteration of bewilderment in their arsenal, along with a healthy dose of slapstick. Elston is a dab hand at this kind of chicanery; some of his productions lean too heavily on pratfalls at the expense of language, but here it’s totally justified. The Comedy of Errors isn’t a wordy play, and here the physical comedy furthers the action rather than stalling it.
The cast are a treat, full of the kind of theatre professionals who consistently smash out top-notch performances time and time again. Dion Mills uses his lovely lilting voice to sonorous effect as the melancholy Egeon – Elston’s decision to break up, and therefore eke out, his interminable opening monologue of exposition is a stroke of genius – while Brisbane and ASC newbie Pidd make beautifully hangdog Dromios. Houghton and Sexton are delicious as the haughty and rather venal Antipholuses, and Brennan and Somers are a riot as the put-upon women. Maverick Newman threatens to steal the play towards the end as an impervious divine, capable of producing claps of thunder with a swish of her arms.
The Comedy of Errors is a fast play, and Elston’s production could frankly be faster, most notably in the first act. It’s often performed without an interval, and the cracking pace and ratcheting of the chaos is a big part of its success in the theatre. Here, that chaos is muted somewhat, although with the addition of a crank mystic by the name of Doctor Pinch (Fabio Motto, letting loose) and a lot of running and crashing about, it gets there in the end. Certainly, it is a riotous, consistently hilarious and beautifully designed show. Not all of our Shakespeare should perhaps be this frivolous, but for now, it’s the perfect tonic.
