The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare Read Free Book Online Page B

space to repose in the jugglers’ hands, a visual as well as an emotional restoration of harmony and order. These two pantomime moments, accompanied by the music of a strolling Klezmer band, suggested what might have been had word and action complemented one another throughout. 32
    For Phyllida Lloyd’s influential and highly-acclaimed Bristol Old Vic production in 1989, Anthony Ward designed a surreal, gravity-defyingset through which characters made joke entrances and exits. Caroline Loncq as Luciana (who was to reprise the role the following year at the RSC) and Rosie Rowell as Adriana were singled out for praise. There was another open-air production at Regent’s Park in 1996 directed by Ian Talbot, the same year as Tim Supple’s small-scale touring version for the RSC. In 1998 Edward Hall directed his Propeller Company at the Watermill Theatre, Newbury. According to one critic, “Hall has touched on some of the true roots of Shakespearian comedy by bringing out its commedia dell’arte dimension … although he has a way to go to bring the play to full flower.” 33
    Surprisingly, there were over forty musical productions of the German version
Die Komödie der Irrungen
in the late twentieth century. An American rap version in 2000,
The Bomb-itty of Errors
, a “frenetic collision of hip-hop and Shakespeare’s” play, 34 started life as the five cast members’ senior thesis at New York University’s Experimental Theater Wing before its successful off-Broadway transfer. In 2001 the Mansaku Company performed
The Kyogen of Errors
at Japan’s Globe Theatre, employing the Kyogen tradition of stylized comic movement, a comic version of the more formal Japanese Noh theater. As is so frequently the case with this play, Brian T. Crowe’s production at the 2001 New Jersey Shakespeare Festival was criticized for its excessive reliance on comic business:
    Of course,
The Comedy of Errors
is an eternal dare to directors desperately seeking shtick … And that’s just where they err in the festival staging here. The precision that farce demands is not seen, only people bumping into people (yes, on purpose yet purposelessly). 35
    Despite this, the production was ultimately judged a success:
    In the end, the joyous coming together of all the misunderstood, the maligned and the just plain mixed-up, bestow lovely moments of real exuberance. Mr. Crowe might have risen to the occasion far sooner had he trusted to the heart of the play, instead of pandering to its obvious invitation to excess. 36
    Similar problems beset the Aquila Theater Company’s 2002 production at the East 13th Street Theater:
    In its new production of Shakespeare’s
Comedy of Errors
, no moment is deemed complete without a bit of fizzy stage business by the actors or a madcap tweak by the director, Robert Richmond. It’s the kind of high-energy effort that encourages the audience to hoot and holler and overlook the fact that the rapid-fire stage antics are only intermittently inspired. 37
    Lisa Carter as Adriana and Mira Kingsley as Luciana were both praised for “show[ing] what can happen when actors act and are not merely being directed for comic effect.” 38
    David Farr’s Bristol Old Vic production in 2003 won unanimous praise for its poised presentation of the play’s diverse elements:
    there is far more to this production than mere punchlines. Maintaining a firm grip on the above-the-line comic pacing, Farr has also tapped into the bleak undercurrent in Shakespeare’s piece: the exploration of how important it is to have one’s own unique identity, and the social and mental chaos into which we can so easily tumble if that essential certainty is destroyed. Ti Green’s set offers a faintly surreal world where things are often not what they seem, with echoes of Rene Magritte, M. C. Escher and the Prague of Franz Kafka … Against this backdrop, Farr’s staging blends expressionism, French farce and slapstick in equal measure to present