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Reviews |
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| The comedy of errors |
| Esme Shirt |
| Published 17 January 2006 |
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The error of our ways
THE COMEDY OF ERRORS
By William Shakespeare
The Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford-upon-Avon
(Until the end of October)
When I was at school I took issue with Shakespeare’s ‘comedies’: they were about as amusing as an afternoon in the House of Lords.
But the RSC’s current production of The Comedy of Errors is funny, even laugh-out-loud so. Fast and energetic, with burlesque musical interludes, it is only a silly vicar and a tennis racket short of farce.
The story line is simple: a man’s identical twin sons and their identical twin servants get separated as babies. By the kind of coincidence which doesn’t only happen in books, they all land up one day years later in the city of Ephesus. Thus the stage is literally set for a series of mistaken identity situations, hilarious to the audience, frustrating and bewildering to those concerned. The play demonstrates how in the course of one day of increasing mayhem, this confusion affects the domains of marriage, commerce and law. A marriage is put under the severest strain; a business all but goes to the wall; justice is compromised.
The audience is entirely confident that all will turn out well, mistakes will be rectified, ill-fortune will be reversed. This, after all, is a comedy! So they delight in the misunderstandings and the antics of a man barred from his own house, and the hysteria of a wife (superbly played by Suzanne Burden), whose husband has no recollection of messages, instructions or promises.
Disbelief is suspended not least in the fact that the twin sons have the same name, and so do the twin servants (beautifully coiffed Dromio). What parent of twins does that? But it all aids the point of this exploration of confusion.
Just one day in a world where what x said to y is denied because y was apparently z (even though x had no way of knowing that, since y and z are both identical and distinct) becomes a mad world, making fools of everyone. Shakespeare exposes through comedy a world where error reigns, where no one’s word can be trusted and promises are worthless. The net result of that is that everything we hold dear or that is crucial to meaningful existence unravels.
Don’t the whole foundations of society — family, commerce, and law — crumble without truth? Now, in a postmodern world, that is no laughing matter.
Esme Shirt
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© Evangelicals Now
This column is used with permission. |
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