COMEDY OF ERRORS
COMEDY OF ERRORS, Bell Shakespeare Company at the Playhouse Theatre, Sydney Opera House, 12 November-7 December 2013. Photography by Matt Nettheim: Renato Musolino, Nathan O'Keefe, Demetrios Sirilas, Septimus Caton and Hazem Shammas; right: Nathan O'Keefe and Jude Henshall.
On opening night in Sydney after a long tour that began in June in Adelaide, the production's director Imara Savage rejoined her cast, telling the post-show crowd of her adventures in the interim (big name drops at this point) and also, rather more significantly, revealing a couple of things that may have been better left unsaid. She said, wryly and ruefully with a wrinkled nose, that of all the Shakespeare plays, John Bell had "given her" this one. And she also noted that since Adelaide there had been "some changes made" - and her tone suggested she didn't approve and there would be notes given.
It was a rather graceless speech, but no less so than her production of this earliest of Shakespeare's comedies, and it was the most truthful thing to have been said during the evening. If Savage had wished for another play it could well be because she has no apparent feel for comedy and obviously little expertise in the most difficult of theatrical forms. And if she didn't like what the cast had done on stage, she could have thought about why they were doing it. It was surely not merely because they're naughty little actor mice playing because the cat had been away.
If the cast had ever trusted the text or been required to honour and understand it, they would appear to have forgotten all about it somewhere among the 96 shows in 32 venues of this country tour. Mugging, shrieking, squealing, eye-popping, capering, whacking, slapping, yelling, yowling, bellowing and barfing can all be funny - in moderation and judiciously placed - but not non-stop for an hour and 45 minutes. And someone had told them to do it in the first place.
Physical comedy and farce are the most rewarding and most difficult things to do in a theatre. On the Playhouse stage, working in front of a witless backdrop set of farce doors, in and out of which they all eventually and inevitably ran and knocked themselves out, any idea of comedy or farce went missing in action within minutes and were never recovered. Timing, technique and discipline are essential - without them the cause is lost. Most often on Thursday night the timing was out, the technique was absent and the discipline was what might be found in herding cats. The consequence was a spectacle of actors frolicking about the stage as if in a school playground, making no attempt to communicate with the play or the audience and apparently not noticing the almost total absence of laughter from the dark.
Comedy of Errors was possibly the most depressing show I've seen this year and the less said about it the better.