The Comedy of Errors (Propeller Shakespeare) - William Shakespeare

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      Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself.

      So I, to find a mother and a brother,

      In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself.

      The Comedy of Errors is technically a farce; but one of the most interesting aspects of farce is how painful it often is, how often the audience is invited to laugh at other people’s misfortunes, as in the repeated beating of the Dromios or Adriana’s sense of marital betrayal. But again, Shakespeare has it both ways: the scene in which Adriana pours out her resentment to the wrong Antipholus is a perfect example of comedy of mistaking; but at the same time we feel for her in her unhappiness. So with the play’s treatment of money. Like its Plautine original, Errors takes place in a primarily mercantile society, symbolised by the theatrical props: Antipholus’ bag of gold, and especially the golden chain which leads to so many of the confusions in the second half of the play. And yet the topic of money may serve to indicate the distance that Shakespeare has travelled from his rather inhuman Plautine model, most obviously in the final scene of each play. In Menaechmi, the equivalent of Antipholus of Ephesus offers his wife for sale; Errors ends with the warmth and reconciliation of a multiple family reunion.

      Roger Warren

      Designing The Comedy of Errors

      It is ironic that this play of happenstance and consequences, a precisely written farce, demands that the designer is doubly exacting and makes no human errors. Shakespeare delights in the form and The Comedy of Errors is as fresh as Feydeau and contemporary as Cooney, with just a dash of Joe Orton’s black humour. Comedies of this sort that, on the page, imply intense and precise physicality in the staging, require a design that maps out the action and anticipates the journey times from any given point on the stage to another. Entrances should be a surprise and exits swift. Aesthetically, they also need to take the audience into a familiar but not necessarily realistic world – hyper-reality perhaps, to match the escalating energy of the narrative in performance.

      Propeller always tries to bring the sixteenth century closer to the twenty-first by overlaying the footprint of one upon the other and exploiting how Shakespeare’s characters negotiate the timeless human situations he has dealt them. In conceiving our unique world for the story, we had to find for ourselves an island community with its own laws and superstitions; as haunted as Prospero’s island and as potentially volatile as our own on a boozy Saturday night. Ephesus should therefore be a multicultural crossroads where all manner of unlikely folk are ‘washed up’ in all senses of the word and where eating, sex and commerce are the prime preoccupations of its entrapped population.

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      Scenic design for The Comedy of Errors

      Obvious then: a run-down piazza in a run-down port in a Tenerife or Capri lookalike. Stags and Hens, police corruption and black market racketeering are the everyday and anyone can lose themselves in the margarita-fuelled 24/7 holiday spirit. Lookalike–everything looks like it might be the real thing, but it has become a fantasy island. The clothes are an eclectic pan-European mix and the locals merge into the shadows behind aviator sunglasses, under the brims of sombreros.

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      Costume designs for The Comedy of Errors

      Shakespeare’s usual implicit arrangement of three entrances, set into a single upstage tiring house with a central balcony above, is a formula for the scenic architecture that designers ignore at their and the production’s peril. Propeller’s Ephesus mirrored this exact plan so that exits and entrances stretched an entering actor’s journey across the stage, allowing for plenty of time to improvise en route, before building up a dangerous head of steam to make a super-fast exit. Doors themselves rarely play a big part in Shakespeare’s staging, but they are great for farce, of course. So our design of three double-height metal shop front shutters splashed with undecipherable scribble and inset doors that smacked shut with an echoing rattle, helped fuel the production’s urban frenzy.

      Michael Pavelka

      Music in The Comedy of Errors

      Somehow the identity of the ensemble in Propeller’s The Comedy of Errors ended up as a mariachi band. This fitted Edward Hall’s idea that the play be set in a cheesy Spanish holiday island for Brits, where raucous eighties pop anthems and loud football shirts ruled, ok. Mariachi not only suited the company’s instrumental talents – we already played guitar, accordion, violins, brass – but also provided the perfect medium for us to play electronic eighties tunes accoustically, as well as giving the required atmosphere of heat, holidays, hilarity, and hot tempers.

      Before the show, the whole company improvised background music in a latin style, including Deve Ser Amor and Bossa Dorado. The second half opened similarly with the Officer singing to a lady in the audience The Girl From Ipanema. Mariachi classics, Cielito Lindo and The Mexican Hat Song introduced Syracuse. And Antipholus of Ephesus’s drunken nights with the Courtesan were accompanied by a brash brass quintet of When The Saints Go Marching In. Gloria Estefan’s Conga closed the first half, and then the cast trooped front of house for the interval to raise money for Children In Need by singing eighties classics arranged Mexican-style by yours truly, including a medley of Eurythmics songs and a fourteen-songs-in-four-minutes a capella megamix.

      The eighties theme continued into the progressively frenetic second half: Antipholus of Syracuse’s wonder at strangers saluting him as ‘their well-acquainted friend’ was accompanied by That’s The Way (I Like It), their offer of ‘commodities to buy’ by Dire Straits’ I want my MTV, or Spandau Ballet’s Gold (we would decide which on the day). And for Pinch’s entrance, I wrote words and music for a madcap Gospel number loosely based on The Old Landmark, to go with the idea that the ‘Conjurer’ was an Evangelist Preacher.

      The music was generally designed to punctuate the action as quickly as possible, so as to help rather than hinder the rhythm and velocity of the text. This was especially true of the stings and stabs from what we called ‘percussion corner’. The violence in Comedy was to be cartoon, so we had a whole barrel of slapsticks, cymbals, cowbells, and woodblocks for the job, and the fun in rehearsals was to decide which sound was best for a hit to the head or which for a punch to the stomach. A glockenspiel was ‘dinged’ every time the ‘chain’ was mentioned. This heightened the madness as the plot got faster and more furious.

      Jon Trenchard

      This Edition

      The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare’s shortest play, was first published in the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays (1623). This edition follows that text closely, apart from a few minor cuts, and incorporates Shakespeare’s own stage directions into our own wherever possible. The Pinch episode, however, is much expanded: the meagre text of this scene is a mere skeleton, clearly inviting comic development and improvisation. We are very grateful to Angie Kendall for her help in preparing this edition.

      Edward Hall and Roger Warren

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      Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse

      (Photographs of the 2011 production)

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      Luciana, Adriana and servants

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      Dr Pinch and ensemble

      Characters

      The DUKE of Ephesus

      AEGEON, a merchant of Syracuse

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