The Comedy of Errors needs little explaining: it is a situation comedy with a dash of Laurel & Hardy. Two sets of identical twins (master and servant) have been separated in their infancy by a shipwreck – as are their parents. Antipholus & Dromio of Syracuse, who grew up with the father, know their story; Antipholus & Dromio of Ephesus, who were separated from the mother, do not. When the Syracusians arrive in Ephesus, chaos ensues.
As in so many of Shakespeare’s plays, water is important. Listen for the lines about it: about drops of water so small in an ocean that they cannot find another drop, or about drops of water that once mingled cannot be separated. Even as a young writer, Shakespeare was very conscious of this part of the human condition: while we are inextricably interconnected, we are also terribly disconnected – even from parts of ourselves. The internet and text messaging have pushed this to an unprecedented level.
That said, let’s think a bit about design. Where is the set? Where are the multiple light changes? Why is the audience lit? Well, because that’s how it was done in Shakespeare’s time. This spring, over 3,000 students will see student matinee performances of The Comedy of Errors and Romeo & Juliet at The Globe. Sometimes we like to give those students a sense of what it was like to see a play 500 years ago – when the focus was on the electricity between characters, and among actors and audience. The other kind of electricity had yet to be discovered, so performances were in the afternoon. The Globe’s stage was the set – so Shakespeare told his audiences where they were through the words.
And costumes? In Shakespeare’s time, they would have been Elizabethan clothing – even if the play was Julius Caesar. We know this because of the text: Casca refers to Caesar wearing a doublet. The Comedy of Errors is one of those plays that, though set in Ephesus in an undesignated time period, is full of very English characters. So we thought of using Elizabethan clothing, but it is heavy and fights against the lightness of the play, which reads as though it should be performed by a troupe of clowns. We considered a really Greek look (Ephesus was on the coast of what is now Turkey, just across the Aegean Sea from Greece), but those are very revealing clothes – making any look-alike attempts pretty impossible. So we returned to my first image – the clown show – for inspiration. Clowns don’t worry about period – their clothing says “I am a clown” and reveals something of the nature of the character. There is a blend of Elizabethan and Greek to reveal the blend in the text. And there are blatant anachronisms – which, hopefully, allow the characters to live in our minds, outside of any particular time period, making them simply human and very much like us.
We hope that you enjoy.