The Comedy of Errors (Propeller Shakespeare). William Shakespeare
Chance
| DROMIO OF SYRACUSE |
|
their twin servants | Will Featherstone |
| DROMIO OF EPHESUS | Matthew McPherson |
ADRIANA, wife of Antipholus of Ephesus James Tucker
LUCIANA, her sister Arthur Wilson
BALTHASAR, a merchant Lewis Hart
ANGELO, a goldsmith David Acton
NELL, the kitchen-maid Alasdair Craig
OFFICER Richard Pepper
COURTESAN Matthew Pearson
PINCH, an exorcist Darrell Brockis
AEM ILIA, the Lady Abbess Alasdair Craig
Other parts played by members of the Company.
It was subsequently presented at:
Belgrade Theatre, Coventry
Theatre Royal, Nottingham
The Lyric, The Lowry, Salford
Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury
Rose Theatre, Kingston-upon-Thames
Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham
Theatre Royal, Newcastle upon Tyne
Théâtre de Marseille – La Criée
King’s Theatre, Edinburgh
National Theatre Craiova, Romania
Theatre Royal, Plymouth
Municipal Theatre, Istanbul, Turkey
Theatre Royal, Brighton
Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford
Globe Theatre, Neuss, Germany
PRODUCTION TEAM
Director Edward Hall
Designer Michael Pavelka
Lighting Designer Ben Ormerod
Music Propeller
Sound David Gregory
Additional Music Direction Jon Trenchard
Text adapted by Edward Hall & Roger Warren
Associate Director Dugald Bruce-Lockhart
Assistant Director Ellen Havard
Costume Supervisor Laura Rushton
Production Manager Nick Ferguson
Company Manager Helen Drew
Stage Manager Nick Hill
Deputy Stage Manager Eleanor Randall
Assistant Stage Manager Janine Bardsley
Wardrobe Mistress Bridget Fell
Lighting on Tour Tom White
Assistant to the Editors Angie Kendall
General Manager Nick Chesterfield
Development Manager Cathy Baker
Executive Producer Caro MacKay
The UK tour was funded by the Arts Council of England, and presented in conjunction with the Touring Partnership.
Propeller
Propeller is a theatre company inspired by Jill Fraser, which began life at the Watermill Theatre in Newbury, Berkshire in 1995. Since then we have been touring Shakespeare all over the world and have now grown in scale whilst still managing to retain the close-knit family feel that has always been such an important part of our work. We like to mix a rigorous approach to the text with a modern physical aesthetic. We have been influenced by mask, animation, classic and contemporary film and music from all ages.
Propeller always places the actor at the centre of the story-making process, which is exactly how it was in Shakespeare’s day. The Elizabethans were denied the modern luxuries of elaborate sets and lighting, instead relying on the skills of the actors themselves to help imagine the plays on stage in every way they could. And so it is with us. A Propeller actor is as likely to find himself shifting scenery, singing or playing rock and roll guitar, as he is to be playing his part on stage in a scene. Over the years, actors with many different skills have passed through the company, from tap dancing champions to highly skilled singers and musicians. Our work has become more and more intricate, needing choreography, musical arrangements and fight direction. At no time have we ever used an outside choreographer or composer to help us with this work. It is all generated from within the company, giving them true ownership of the work they are creating. These editions of some of the texts we have performed are designed to give the reader an idea of how we approached each production from text choices down to doubling schemes, design and music.
Edward Hall
Farce And Humanity:
The Comedy of Errors
The Comedy of Errors was performed, presumably by Shakespeare’s company, at Gray’s Inn on 28 December 1594. Was it then a new play? The London theatres were closed, because of a virulent outbreak of the plague, from July 1592 to April 1594, during which time Shakespeare wrote his two narrative poems; he may also have written Errors at that time, ready for performance when the theatres reopened. Errors used to be regarded as an even earlier work, perhaps written for local performance before he left Stratford; but this view reflected a low estimate of the play, and modern performances have shown it to be a brilliant piece of theatrical mechanism; it is hard to see how this could have been achieved without the experience of working in the professional theatre.
Shakespeare’s main source is the Menaechmi by the classical dramatist Plautus; but he made substantial changes. To begin with, he gave the twin masters of the Menaechmi twin servants, thus doubling the potential for confusion and mistaking. Then he moved the setting from Epidamnum to Ephesus, which was famous – or notorious – in the ancient world, and in the Bible, as a centre of witchcraft, so that Antipholus of Syracuse half-expects strange things to happen to him.
But Shakespeare’s most crucial, and most personal, changes modify the tone of his original. He enclosed the central confusions within a framework – the story of Aegeon and his ultimate reunion with his wife and family – taken from a very different kind of story, the legend of Apollonius of Tyre, to which he returned at the end of his career in Pericles. Still more significant, he introduced an element of romance into the mistakings, in the wooing of Luciana by Antipholus of Syracuse, where the language looks forward to his later comedies, and connects with his own love poetry in the Sonnets. Antipholus calls Luciana ‘mine own self’s better part’, a phrase which echoes Shakespeare’s calling his lover ‘the better part of me’ in Sonnets 39 and 74. His interest in twins, both here and in Twelfth Night, may also derive from personal considerations. He was the father of twins, and this may have informed Antipholus of Syracuse’s sense of loss and personal disorientation when separated from his twin:
I to the world am like a drop of water
That in the ocean seeks another drop,