With
the Globe To Globe season on Bankside and the RSC’s central plank of
the World Shakespeare Festival both now running, a certain desperation
is creeping into the classification of plays within the plethora of
Bardism currently on offer. The RSC, for instance, has grouped
The Comedy Of Errors,
Twelfth Night and
The Tempest together as “the
Shipwreck Trilogy” and staged them with the same ensemble company. On
the evidence of the first two openings, there is as little coherence in
staging as in its collocation in the first place: why not
The Winter’s Tale and/or
Pericles as well/instead?
The thematic concepts common to these plays are, it is claimed, matters
of belonging, of being lost and found. In Amir Nizar Zuabi’s production
of
The Comedy Of Errors,
however, the more palpable sensations are of freedom and captivity; it
is not so much that the twin Antipholus brothers, their Dromio servants
and others are lost or found, as that they are constrained or
liberated. This perspective may be informed by Zuabi’s everyday
experience (he is artistic director of Palestine’s ShiberHur company).
The Ephesus of the play is, in Jon Bausor’s design, a bustling
dockyard: people emerge from crates, hide in oil drums, and Antipholus
of Ephesus’s home is flown on via a gantry crane. In this environment
human beings are likewise treated as objects: the opening scene shows
old Egeon being subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques”, and
even the nervy Adriana waterboards her sister Luciana at one point. But
this is not a sombre or a solemn staging; indeed, at a mere two hours
including interval, it hurtles along at a near-frantic lick. Stephen
Hagan and Jonathan McGuinness as the Antipholi, and Felix Hayes and
Bruce MacKinnon as the Dromios, are sensitive to both the similarities
and differences between their pairs of twins.
The identical male/female twins in
Twelfth
Night, Sebastian and Viola, require one of drama’s greatest
suspensions of disbelief; still more so in David Farr’s production, in
which Emily Taaffe does not even come up to Hagan’s shoulder – we are
well into Schwarzenegger/DeVito twin territory here. Taaffe’s Viola
could be as appealing as her demure bobbysoxer Luciana, but for the
fact that Farr seems to have directed his cast to be consistently
strident. Virtually every line uttered by any of the several lovers
comes out as a plaintive wail. Jonathan Slinger is running out of
Shakespearean pervs to play now, but he doubles Dr Pinch in the
Comedy with a PVC-stockinged,
posing-pouched Malvolio here. He is, however, sabotaged by the visual
concept of setting the action in a derelict art-deco hotel lobby:
dressing Malvolio in managerial pinstripes accentuates his resemblance
to
The Fast Show’s Mark
Williams and keeps one expecting him to gasp, “Ooh! Suit you, my
lady!” Kevin McMonagle, too, looks more like an office worker
than the cynical old muso Feste is here intended to be, and is wildly
adrift in his characterisation and delivery. Whether Farr’s
Tempest pulls any conceptual
threads together remains to be seen, but my impression so far is that
there are few such threads to be pulled.
Written for the Financial
Times.