THE COMEDY OF ERRORS
Ludlow Castle, Shropshire
Opened 23 June, 2007
***
The Shropshire market town of Ludlow hosts an arts festival each June
and July, the flagship event of which is an open-air Shakespeare
production in the Norman-built inner bailey of Ludlow Castle. On a
balmy summer evening, with swallows arcing overhead and church bells
ringing out, it can make for a great theatrical idyll. However, I have
also experienced rain and wind that punish the cast, batter the
audience and turn the event into a middle-aged theatregoing equivalent
of the Glastonbury rock festival. This year's midsummer storms did not
augur well for my matinee visit; a couple of days earlier, the nearby
town of Wellington had even had its own twister.
In the event, the skies lowered throughout the afternoon but disgorged
only a couple of brief showers of spitting rain, dampening neither the
spirits nor the clothes of the audience or the cast of Glen Walford's
production. Not that some of the actors had that many clothes to get
wet: most of the female population of Walford's Ephesus seem to favour
diaphanous harem garb, in keeping with a design by Rodney Ford that
turns the bailey into a Hanna-Barbera cartoon version of an exotic
Eastern port. As the Antipholus and Dromio twins, sundered years
earlier, find themselves in the same city and are repeatedly mistaken
for each other, they are subjected to numerous belly-dance-style pelvic
wiggles and thrusting tushes. Jonathan Markwood as Antipholus of
Syracuse may claim that he "doth abhor" his Ephesian twin's wife
Adriana, but earlier he shows a distinct lack of reluctance when she
unleashes her full siren arsenal to entice him back to "their" home.
When the cause of the confusion is finally revealed and Adèle
Lynch's Adriana gasps, "I see two husbands," we can see her realising
the possibilities. As Adriana's sister Luciana, Louise Shuttleworth (no
relation) is deliberately too good to be true: she may bat her eyelids
in virtuous innocence, but this inflames A. of S. to even more amorous
excesses.
Walford has realised that performances need to be vocally and
gesturally large to carry across this space, which is a lot harder to
play than it may look; she also has an awareness of the production's
place as part of a festival, which has sometimes been missing in the
past. This translates in practice into big vaudevillean performances,
of the kind that think "subtleties" are captions on foreign films. I
must admit this was not initially to my taste. Nor did it seem to be
wowing the audience: although the school parties that constituted over
half the crowd seemed attentive, there were few of the big laughs that
came so regularly in, for instance, Christopher Luscombe's
Plautine-farce treatment of the same play outdoors at Shakespeare's
Globe last summer.
But gradually we were won over. Walford concentrates the comedy in the
twin manservants, played by Roy Holder and Matthew Devitt; the latter
has an additional credit as "comic techniques director" and shows his
mettle with an interpolated routine in which he uses a length of rope
as everything from a double-bass to a Hitler moustache. Nor does my
earlier jibe about lack of subtlety apply to Carol Sloman as the
Abbess, mischievously delivering her lines about lust as "A sin
prevailing much in youthful men/Who give their eyes the liberty of
gazing" straight to a bank of schoolboys, not one of whom twigged that
she was taking the mickey out of them. And during that final scene (of
a surprisingly brisk rendition, at barely two hours including
interval), the sun at last came out to ensure that the production, like
the story, ended happily.
Written for the Financial
Times.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
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