THE COMEDY OF ERRORS. To 11 June.
Sheffield
THE COMEDY OF ERRORS
by William Shakespeare
Crucible Theatre To 11 June 2005
Tue-Sat 7.30pm Mat 8 June 2.30pm
Audio-described 10 June (+ Touch Tour 6pm)
BSL Signed 9 June
Post-shoe Discussion 9 June
Runs 2hr min One interval
TICKETS: 0114 249 6000
www.sheffieldtheatres.co.uk/buyit
Review: Timothy Ramsden 1 June
Nothing becomes this production so much as its endings.Shakespeare set his comedy of long-separated twin masters and servants meeting unknowingly, with plentiful confusion, in Ephesus. That's Ephesus, Cal. in Jonathan Munby's Sheffield production, the town's name spelled out on high like the Hollywood sign (at least till the interval; what happened? Terrorists took it?). With a US-style cop to keep order, Hilton McRae's Solinus becomes the governor-type, his speech all sage and considered, in contrast to McRae's Wild West faith-healing Dr Pinch.
This is a town of red-hot whores (and the odd transvestite) suggesting the devil the newly-arrived Dromio calls Kirsty Bushell's gum-chewing Courtesan. It makes Solinus' official world, on the Crucible stage's blue-water floor, seem unreal.
The American matriarchy, though, gets a limited look in. Rebecca Johnson is fine as the wife surprised when her husband' doesn't recognise her, making clear how sorrow sours into a rind of hardness, without love congealing underneath. But there's only a hint of Luciana's attraction for her brother-in-law's lookalike. Carol Macready's stout servant Luce is a formidable comic treat.
Despite judicious textual trimming, the comic performances don't entirely avoid the excitability so often used as substitute for dated verbal jokes, though Michael Matus and John Marquez' intelligent Dromio twins mostly steer clear. Marquez gives a delightful account of both sides of an argument, including slaps and kicks, individually recounted as given and received.
Munby triumphs in the Aykbourn-like staging of the dinner scene where the wrong Antipholus and Dromio are admitted, the real husband and servant locked out. Both sides of the door are simultaneously shown, the stage split diagonally between the house's interior and exterior. As the pace increases awareness blurs between the play's reality that the Dromios, ever closer as they dash about, are on different sides of a wall, and their real-life proximity, culminating in a so-near/so-far moment of missed recognition through a letter-box.
It's a delicious moment, deepening the story of separations, confusions and mistakes, looking forward to the surprisingly muted end where these 2, at least, walk off in concord, as the sea noisily swirls. A final, wonderfully overblown Hollywood cliché: brotherhood amidst family dissention.
Courtesan: Kirsty Bushell
Angelo: Nick Caldecott
Gaoler/Officer: Christopher Chilton
Antipholus of Syracuse: Oliver Dimsdale
Balthasar: Alan Gilchrist
Antipholus of Ephesus: Martin Hutson
Adriana: Rebecca Johnson
Luciana: Hattie Ladbury
Luce/Aemilia: Carol Macready
Dromio of Ephesus: John Marquez
Dromio of Syracuse: Michael Matus
Solinus/Doctor Pinch: Hilton McRae
Egeon: Stuart Organ
!st/2nd Merchants: James Thorne
Director: Jonathan Munby
Designer: Mike Britton
Lighting: Oliver Fenwick
Composer/Musical Director: Dominic Haslam
Choreographer: Michael Ashcroft
Fight director: Terry King
Voice/Dialect coach: Kate Godfrey
Assistant director: Dominic Leclerc
2005-06-02 10:21:02