37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 30: The Comedy of Errors

The Comedy of Errors, first broadcast December 24th, 1983

• When was it written: Possibly in 1594, perhaps his fifth play and first comedy.
• What’s it about? Two sets of twins, two young lords both named Antipholus and two slaves both named Dromio, are separated at youth and know nothing of each other. When their father is about to be executed for a debt, they all end up in the Greek city of Ephesues, where there are many mix-ups but everything ends happily (except for, y’know, the two slaves who are not freed and still constantly beaten)
• Most famous dialogue: Oddly, this is a beloved and often-staged play, but no one piece of dialogue has really become famous.
• Sources: The play is a modernised adaptation of Menaechmi by Plautus, a Roman playwright.
• Interesting fact about the play: This is the only play to mention America, despite being set in ancient Greece. Jones cuts the line here, possibly because it’s so jarring.
• Best insult: “He is deformèd, crooked, old, and sere, Ill-faced, worse-bodied, shapeless everywhere, Vicious, ungentle, foolish, blunt, unkind, Stigmatical in making, worse in mind.”
• Best word: This play had no words that were unfamiliar or strange to me, which is one reason it can be staged so widely.
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: I saw an excellent production at Chicago Shakespeare Company as a play-within-a-play set during the Blitz (and I saw a fine production at Earlham College way back in the day)
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: Roger Daltry of “The Who” is both Dromios! Michael Kitchen, whom you’ve seen in things, is both Antiphili. Charles Gray also returns as the befuddled judge who has to sort everything out.

How’s the cast?

• Excellent. As an actor, Daltry is only remembered for playing the lead in the movie of Tommy, but this proves that he was a very gifted comic actor who could have had a good side career if he hadn’t been so busy rocking. Kitchen does a great job playing the two Antiphili slightly differently despite dressing the same. The ladies are great, the old people are great, everyone’s great.

How’s the direction by James Cellan Jones?

• Absolutely delightful. Everything is bright and colorful, befitting the sprightly text. The town sprawls around a massive map of the peninsula and circus performers prance about at all times doing their tricks. Ultimately, Jones’ best decision was the casting, which I’ll discuss more below.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Stories are Better When Everybody Isn’t Dumb

Usually, this play is staged by casting two pairs of actors who look similar but not identical to each other as the two pairs of twins. This makes all of the townspeople who stare one Dromio in the face, and then stare the other Dromio in the face five minutes later, and can’t tell them apart, look like idiots. Jones does something different, simply casting one actor as each set of twins, dressed and styled identically.

Normally, this doubling cannot be done, because all four are together on stage for a long scene at the end, but this is, of course, TV, and Jones can simply do the ending Patty Duke-style, which works fine.

But there were complainers. According to Wikipedia: 

• “This production used editing and special effects to have each set of twins played by the same actors. However, this was not well received by critics, who argued that not only was it confusing for the audience as to which character was which, but much of the comedy was lost when the characters look identical.”

Allow me to say, those critics were bozos. I’ve seen this play many times, always with actors that looked kind-of-similar as the twins, and it’s never worked this well. Yes, every time Dromio or Antipholus appears, it’s a bit confusing for a moment about which one this is, but then the fun of it is figuring that out from context clues. It never took me more than a minute to get caught up on which one I was watching, and I’m famous for my failure to follow complex stories.

As for “much of the comedy” being lost, the implication here is that a key source of laughs in the play is that these idiotic townspeople can’t tell these not-entirely-similar actors apart. But Jones’ comedy is a more generous comedy. There are no idiots here. Anyone would be very confused in this situation, and these mix-ups are entirely understandable. The comedy arises from our frustration at understanding a situation that they couldn’t possibly understand, and I found it hilarious.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Don’t Let Yourself Get Boxed In

There’s a certain “Dylan goes electric” feel to this play, where we have an artist suddenly branching out in a new direction and hoping his audience goes along.

We’re fairly certain that Shakespeare wrote the three Henry VI plays first (in one order or another), then Richard III. That quartet has very little comedy (unlike his later history quartet, which has Falstaff to lighten things). This was a badass playwright writing brutal history plays on blood-spattered sets. Then, it’s possible that this was the fifth play, an adaptation of an old Roman comedy. The result is a brilliantly funny farce, but theatergoers must have been totally unprepared for this very silly comedy, if we’re right in our suppositions about play order.

(Curiously, there’s almost no subplot. In almost every scene the two Dromios are mistaken for each other or the two Antipholi are mistaken for each other. It’s a dozen permutations of a single joke.)

I wrote a blog post 15 years ago advocating that writers might want to stay in their lane, but this play argues the opposite. You can yank your audience in radical new directions, if you have total confidence in your genius as a playwright, which thankfully Shakespeare did.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Don’t, Y’know, Endorse Beating Slaves

My daughter just made her Shakespearean debut as Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing. It was wonderful, but watching this, I kept wondering if they should have staged this one instead. Much Ado is the better play, of course, but this one is, I would say, funnier, and certainly shorter (It’s Shakespeare’s shortest play). The only reason not to stage it is that owning and beating slaves is not condemned, and the “happy ending” leaves the Dromios still enslaved. (And one of the two without a love interest.)

And how do you cast it according to modern gender-blind and colorblind casting? It’s tempting to not have the four of them be white men, but as soon as you change either pair to women or another race, then the constant beatings the Dromios receive at the hands of the Antipholi become something that’s much harder to take.

Ultimately, I think you’d have to take out all the beatings, which I think would work fine. Ideally you would free the slaves at the end too, but I don’t think you could do that without altering the text, which I usually do not endorse.

Personally, with a large cast of 8-13 year olds, I would have done Midsummer, but this one would have been tempting (the lack of unfamiliar words would also help) but, in the end, it’s probably too problematic.