Errors of Comedy

The Comedy of Errors
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Observer

When he was very young, Kenneth Tynan laid down that no really first-rate director could be at home with broad comedy. He was wrong, of course, but I find his opinion of some comfort when considering Adrian Noble’s Stratford production of The Comedy of Errors. Mr. Nobles is a director of proven brilliance, but his first major attempt at drama deigned to provoke laughter is catastrophic. 

There are some touches that are truly Noble. One is the lost, questing arrival in Ephesus of the visiting Antipholus and Dromio. Coming through a door in the white wall of Ultz’s set, they appear dazed, almost blind. This is of course is not a funny moment, nor meant to be. When the farce begins—when master and man are mistaken for their respective twins—Mr. Noble works diligently at it. He must have done no end of research into traditional comic routines. 

Some of it showed in his production of King Lear with Antony Sher’s clown-compendium performance as the Fool. The one thing that performance was not was amusing; nor did it need to be. But The Comedy of Errors does need, and this production is all technique and no humour. It keeps stepping on its own laughs. Blows and pratfalls, of which there are many, are accompanied by tympani-rolls in the orchestra. The pulling of Dromio’s nose provokes ruder noises in the pit. Pedantry, the RSC’s recurring vice, here takes a new form. This, the production seems to be saying, is clowning; aren’t you impressed?

Design and music run the show. Nigel Hess draws for his times, pleasingly enough, on Scott Joplin, Vincent Youmans and the Keystone Kops. In the scene of Pinch the conjuror he takes over (or the play throws in the sponge) and we get a number. Pinch is painted yellow, and the text does indeed say that he has a saffron face. But it makes no mention of the Dromios having red noses, or of the Antipholi being blue. They look like the Atlantines (who, old Eagle readers will remember, were the good Venusians oppressed by the green Trees). Farce works by putting recognisable people in extreme situations. I don’t recognise anyone with a blue face. I even jib at a heroine (Jane Booker) whose hair has been tied up like an ice-cream cone, however stylish. 

The performances display some skill and, in the case of Paul Greenwood, who plays a scene hanging upside-down from a window, intrepidity. Peter McEnery is brisk, Henry Goodman earthy, Richard O’Callaghan nicely woeful and Zoë Wannamaker, trimly volcanic, nearly creates a character. Joseph O’Conor and Timothy Kightley are solid elders. There are some grace-notes: the final reconciliation, and an earlier rapprochement between master and servant when the former has beaten the latter and, penitent, gives him a cuddle. 

There is also some atrocious verse-speaking, especially from the Duke. While they wait to mature into comedy directors (and it is not just Mr. Noble’s problem—John Caird with The Twin Rivals is about the only young director in or out of the RSC to have displayed any sustained lightness of touch), Stratford chiefs could practise counting the number of beats in an iambic pentameter. They used to know how.