The Comedy of Errors

by Kent Cartwright

  In December 1819, Frederick Reynolds premiered an English operatic version, close in its script to Hull’s, with the addition of music; it was performed, apparently with great success, twenty-seven times.170 Reynolds adorned Errors with a cornucopia of ‘ “Song, Duets, Glees, and Chorusses, Selected entirely from the Plays, Poems and Sonnets of Shakespeare” ’ (Odell, Shakespeare, 2.131). Reynolds’s lavish staging included a hunting scene with snow-capped mountains and a ‘grand bacchanalian revel’ at Balthazar’s house, while the finale ‘blaze[d] up’ with a medley taken from The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2.132, 134). In New York, a version of Errors, probably Hull’s adaptation, appeared on the stage in 1804,171 while in 1845 a trimmed, farcical Errors was launched at Niblo’s Garden by the twins Thomas and Henry Placide. The Placides, as the Dromios, dominated the play with their banter, antics and stage business, such as Syracusan Dromio’s use of a horseshoe to repel magic – and they kept doing it for twenty years (Var., 527). Stripped down to a farce at Smock Alley, sentimentalized by Hull, overwhelmed with music and operatic values by Reynolds or turned into a vehicle for the Dromios: stage renderings of Errors had preferred limited visions of the play to the complexities of Rowe’s frontispiece.

  That condition changed when, at London’s Sadler’s Wells Theatre in 1855, Samuel Phelps substantially restored Errors. Phelps was part of a theatrical vanguard advocating a return to Shakespeare’s playtexts – especially to Shakespeare’s language. Phelps cut a relatively modest 234 lines (e.g. some forty lines from Egeon in 1.1, the punning on Time in 2.2 and part of the Dromios’ reunion (Var., 553)) and retained a few of Hull’s additions. The Courtesan, ‘Lesbia’ in Hull, makes a return. Phelps’s version, performed twenty-eight times at Sadler’s Wells over five seasons, was the closest that the London stage had come to Shakespeare’s Errors in 250 years; audiences laughed heartily, although critics carped (see Allen, 314 –15, 222). In 1858, a blackface minstrel adaptation was staged in New York (see Wells, Burlesques) and there, too, the J.S. Clarke interpretation (1864), in the spirit of Victorian realism, emphasized the mercantile aspects of the play with its elaborate staging of a market scene in 4.3 (Var., 553 – 4). In 1878, W.H. Crane and Stuart Robson began their decade-long success as the Dromios in a scenically overstuffed version of Errors, with features (in 1885) such as a vast pageant of priests, priestesses and acolytes of the goddess Diana. America lacked a transformational Phelps. In London, the return of ‘original’ Shakespeare reached an important point in 1895 with a December performance of Errors in the Great Hall of Gray’s Inn, directed by William Poel (see Fig. 16). The performers wore sixteenth-century costumes, played before the hall screen without set or interval and attempted to capture period acting values, while spectators sat at the hall’s long tables. G.B. Shaw termed it ‘delightful’.172 This production honoured the playtext and its implicit scenic fluidity.

  16 William Poel’s 1895 production of The Comedy of Errors, Act 5, Scene 1, ‘Not One Before Another’; photograph by Russell & Sons

  Stage: four twentieth-century productions and an adaptation

  On 12 April 1938, at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, the Russian director Theodore Komisarjevsky launched undoubtedly the most famous modern production of The Comedy of Errors. Komisarjevsky, who emigrated from Russia to England in 1919 because of Lenin’s hostility to theatre, introduced British audiences to Chekhov’s plays and built a reputation for innovative directing.173 His Errors rejected Victorian scenic realism and Poel’s bare stage in favour of abstraction, a dream-like Ephesus of colourful, off-scale ‘toy-town’ houses and of mixed period costumes (plumed bowler hats of different colours, sailors in US naval uniform, Viennese Keystone Cops, top hats and frock coats, modern handbags, Elizabethan farthingales, futuristic garb) that defied identification with any particular time or place (see Fig. 17).174 Consequently, the set took on a ‘haunting, almost hallucinogenic quality’ (Berry, ‘Komisarjevsky’, 81). This Ephesus evoked the ‘proper scene of eternal pantomime and harlequinade. Its citizens appear as puppets and playboys bound to no especial century, but heirs of a timeless invention. In a moment we are enraptured.’175 A clock in a central tower struck the hours, with its hands whirling around to catch up – a witty response to the play’s interest in time. All was colour, brightness, merriment and physical inventiveness, with evocations of the Marx Brothers, The Mikado and Mae West (from the Courtesan). Errors’s dark opening with the Syracusan merchant was quickly forgotten as the action gave way to inventive farce. The Duke was accompanied by a servant who mimicked his gestures and facial expressions. The pink of the Dromios’ bowlers was echoed in the Abbess’s clothing. Citizens were liable to outbreaks of singing and dancing; it was an ‘operatic, balletic diversion’ (Trewin, Shakespeare, 179). At the end of the first act, Ephesian Antipholus’ line – ‘This jest shall cost him some expense’ – was repeated chorally by others to the music of Handel. Conversely, long speeches were divided among different speakers, creating a ‘collectivization of response’ reminiscent of a Victorian glee club (Berry, ‘Komisarjevsky’, 82). The atmosphere was both carnivalesque and dream-like, as if the world really had turned topsy-turvy. Komisarjevsky’s influential Errors transformed this previously undervalued play into a theatrical tour de force.

  17 Act 5, Scene 1, in Theodore Komisarjevsky’s production for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1938

  Some seven months after Komisarjevsky’s production, and across the Atlantic, Errors figured in another signal theatrical event. On 23 November 1938, at the Alvin Theatre in New York, the musical The Boys from Syracuse opened, with book by George Abbott, music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Lorenz Hart and choreography by George Balanchine. It was a smash hit. Boys introduced songs that became standards, and it still retains its capacity to delight.176 With Boys, Errors became the first Shakespeare play adapted for a musical in the American theatre, and the production ‘introduced’ to Broadway the ‘organic musical’, in which music, lyrics and dance became ‘integral to the plot and advanced its development’.177 Boys gives a political twist to certain of Errors’s incidents and otherwise creates contemporary interest. Its opening scene of a mob calling for execution, its emphasis on the irrational criminalizing of a person’s birthplace and its attention to the Syracusans’ urgency to hide themselves all allude to political events in Nazi Europe. Boys also develops Errors’s tensions about marriage. Adriana and Luciana no longer debate marital hierarchy; rather, the two, especially Luciana, become romantic principals – although, ironically, their music is sometimes fitted out with anti-romantic lyrics. Boys considerably expands Luce’s role and displaces the real criticism of marriage on to the lower-class characters, as in Luce’s song ‘What Can You Do with a Man?’ The Courtesan, with her associates, takes on a larger and franker role in Boys than in Errors. Likewise, the division of Ephesian Antipholus’ attention between two women is made concrete and illustrated in a pas de trois, with one woman wearing ballet shoes, the other tap. Syracusan Antipholus’ concern in Errors about identity becomes realized in Boys, not by him, but by the Dromios in a mirrored dream-dance and song, ‘Big Brother’. The plebs gain sympathy over the toffs. Boys also features a comic ‘lock-out’ scene that, expanding on Errors’s fear of scandal, turns into a public near-riot of music and dance (see Fig. 18). Boys constitutes a brilliant reading of Errors.

  18 ‘Let Antipholus In’. The Boys from Syracuse, New York, 1938

  Meanwhile, back at Stratford-upon-Avon, it would be twenty-four years before the RSC, in 1962, again undertook The Comedy of Errors, this time as an after-thought (a substitute for a cancelled play) but with revelatory effect.178 Directed by Clifford Williams, this production succeeded because it both emphasized the ensemble quality of the play and brought out not only its farcical humour but its complex tonalities. Williams’s version was the closest expression to date of the v
alues perceived in the Rowe frontispiece. The set was restrained, with three performance tiers and a ramp that facilitated the flow of action. Before the start of the play proper, the actors filed out, dressed in similar grey tops and jeans, and showed themselves to the audience, heightening metatheatrical awareness. The performance added colour as it proceeded, and it likewise paid attention to the play’s varied emotional and generic tones. Egeon’s soulful opening narrative made audiences feel ‘genuinely concerned’; Syracusan Antipholus reacted to events ‘like someone imprisoned in a Kafkaesque nightmare’; and Adriana exhibited ‘a genuine core of feeling’.179 The staging of 3.1 was addressed by Syracusan Dromio’s air-drawing of a door, behind which he could hide. Although the production was bright with music, mime and commedia dell’arte touches, it also showed ‘dark and disquieting forces at work’ (Billington, 488). Its power and memorability thus arose from a sensitive engagement with the playtext. The company’s complementary ensemble acting also made the production a definitive statement of the RSC style (see Fig. 19). The cast blended ‘superlative team-work’ with ‘physical slickness’ and ‘complete understanding of comedy’s vocal nuances’ (Gardner, 481). Characters were sharply etched, and humour was not imposed but arose through situation.

  19 Act 5, Scene 1, directed by Clifford Williams for the Royal Shakespeare Company, 1962

  Williams’s comprehension of both the hilarity and the disquieting mystery of Errors encouraged subsequent explorations.Trevor Nunn’s 1976 Comedy of Errors for the RSC managed to combine aspects of Williams’s production with those of American musical comedy. (This production can be seen in DVD format.) Guy Woolfenden wrote the music and Nunn the lyrics, with Gillian Lynne choreographing. The nine original musical numbers, using lines of dialogue as points of departure, displayed ‘a variety of styles, from rock to Greek’, with ‘zappy choral songs’ adding ‘pace and lift’ (Emerson, 498). Doctor Pinch exorcized Ephesian Antipholus by singing and dancing (see Fig. 20); Syracusan Antipholus and Luciana wooed each other in a duet, and Ephesian Dromio crooned and danced away his beatings, so that the songs advanced the action, although sometimes with a loss of darkness and critical impact. Nunn’s Ephesus was a cluttered Turkish marketplace catering to tourists, with people wearing straw hats, women of dubious honour leaning from balconies, men hanging around in outdoor bars and gangsters styled after the 1930s. The Duke was a dictator with big epaulettes, and Syracusan Antipholus had a touch of ‘gum-chewing sleaziness’.180 While Emerson calls Nunn’s version ‘rollicking fun’ (497), Warren objects that the song and dance turned characters into ‘puppets’ and blunted their personalities, especially compared to Williams’s production (500) – a comment that hints at both the opportunities and the sand-traps of Errors.

  20 Act 4, Scene 4, directed by Trevor Nunn for the Royal Shakespeare Company, 1976. Doctor Pinch (Robin Ellis) preparing for his examination of Dromio (Nickolas Grace) and Antipholus of Ephesus (Mike Gwilym)

  If Nunn’s Errors ‘managed to keep Aegeon credibly pathetic’ (Trewin, ‘Britain’, 216), no production has explored pathos so much as Tim Supple’s for the RSC in 1996 at The Other Place in Stratford-upon-Avon. Miola captures its tone:

  At the outset we see a glum, shackled old man, who eventually tells his woeful story without gimmickry or distracting stage business, conveying real anguish at his losses and his plight. At the end Emilia appears as a serious woman who has suffered and found strength and peace in the spiritual life, instead of as the usual cartoon in a nun’s costume. Their reunion is poetic and moving, though they forgo the customary joyful embrace, that easy solution yielding to the delicate and wary uncertainty of spouses who are now strangers.

  (Miola, ‘Play’, 34 –5)181

  Supple offered no Plautine houses or colourful toy-town; rather, his set was stark, dark and simple, with central double doors and a few windows fixed in a brick façade. In front of it were ramps and a grille to which, before the play began, the audience saw the dirty, ragged Egeon chained. Mystery, strangeness and wonder saturated this production rather than pantomime and double-takes. The casting was multi-ethnic. Unfamiliar middle-eastern instruments played eerie Turkish music; bells sounded, prompting action; the breaking of ocean waves could be heard in the distance. As part of the soundscape, the verse was realized subtly, and with effect, as when Solinus listened intently to Egeon’s words. Magic and witchcraft were real, disturbing possibilities in this Ephesus, and Syracusan Antipholus reacted with apt superstition and amazement. At the end, characters faced the future with a sense of uncertainty. Notwithstanding, the central scenes were farcical and active (see Fig. 21), so that the drama generated both boisterous humour and emotional profundity. This production ‘treated the play with deep respect and with a thoughtful, affectionate delight in the story’ (Smallwood, 217). Supple’s production was a signal achievement, even deepening the insight suggested by the Rowe frontispiece.

  21 Act 2, Scene 2, directed by Tim Supple for the Royal Shakespeare Company, 1996. Antipholus of Syracuse (Robert Bowman, right) to Dromio of Syracuse (Dan Milne): ‘Yea, dost thou jeer and flout me in the teeth? Think’st thou I jest? Hold, take thou that, and that!’ (2.2.22–3)

  From Komisarjevsky’s hallucinogenic farce, to Rodgers and Hart’s exuberant musical adaptation, to Williams’s textual sensitivity and commedia dell’arte touch, to Nunn’s stuffed, good-natured musical romp, to Supple’s haunting essay on wonder: the range latent in The Comedy of Errors becomes self-evident. The problem of identity and otherness has resilient appeal, while the play’s abstract patterning, its oppositions and its varied and elastic tonalities allow for stretching, compressing, decorating and recolouring without forfeiting the dramatic core. Justly so, since these interpretations of Errors have continued the tradition of revision that Shakespeare brought to Plautus.

  Stage: other modern productions and adaptations

  Under the influence of such varied explorations, The Comedy of Errors has now become an often-performed play. Its adaptability and its multiple valencies invite experimentation with all sorts of modes and settings: sunny Italian coastal town, Turkish bazaar, nostalgic Edwardian England, 1930s cubist metropolis, London inner-city neighbourhood, ‘post-consumerist present’ (Rutter, 459), gangster-land New Jersey, carnival or bare stage. It can be played as a madcap farce, as a balance of romance and comedy, or as something darker; music is often added, and circus motifs and allusions to early twentieth-century film comedies frequently recur. It also lends itself to political or cultural commentary. In 1923, the Ethiopian Theatre of Chicago produced a jazz version of Errors performed by African-American actors – perhaps, in its own way, a response to the nineteenth-century minstrel Errors . An Edwardian-styled production (2011) became a commentary on pre-1918 class divisions and cultural values.182 In 2012, St Louis’s Repertory Theatre set the play in New Orleans, with jazz-era standards woven nostalgically into the narrative. Adrian Noble’s immensely popular 1983 RSC version of Errors featured jazz, ragtime music, carnival tunes and dance steps in a production with circus themes, slapstick gags and costumes and make-up that, in Brechtian style, constituted the set. His Dromios wore plaid trousers and beeping red noses; the Antipholus brothers’ faces were bright blue, Doctor Pinch’s saffron; Luciana’s hair looked like an ice-cream cone; and the Courtesan rose out of a trapdoor wearing red face-paint and a red leotard. Going a step further, in 1987 the Flying Karamazov Brothers premiered a Comedy of Errors in which all the Ephesians shared an odd characteristic: they were all ‘nimble jugglers’ (CE 1.2.98). The townsfolk included tightrope walkers, sword-swallowers, tumblers, fire-eaters and a baton-twirling Adriana.