THE COMEDY OF ERRORS / TWELFTH NIGHT
Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
Opened 25 April, 2012
*** / **

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.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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