Right To Be Wrong

Running from the 16th July to 6th October at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford, The Comedy of Errors is a fine example of the cultural delicacies that the county of Warwickshire have to offer. One of Shakespeare’s earliest and most farcical plays, The Comedy of Errors sees a series of mishaps and muddlings arise as two sets of twins accidentally separated at birth are unknowingly reunited on the island of Syracuse.
The most recent interpretation is directed by Amir Nizar Zuabi, a leading theatrical helmsman from the Middle East, whom chooses to highlight both the hilarious slapstick of the play as well as its dark, more violent undertones.
Indeed for all of the play’s comic confusions and modern references – think gangster-style rap and youth culture costuming – there are timeworn themes of oppression, immigration and torture. Whilst not exactly what you might except from a rip-roaring riotous comedy, the delightful mixture of mystical violence-tinged tension with Shakespearean wit and slapstick maintain an intense but brilliantly funny atmosphere, sustained by both the pacing and performance. Lines are delivered at quick-fire speed, leaving little time for nuance, however this is balanced by wonderfully colourful turns from the entire cast.
If you think that repeated cases of mistaken identities will become tiresome then think again. The cast are refreshingly responsive to audience interaction and inflect their delivery with pitch variation and faultless comic timing, managing to keep laugh after laugh coming despite Shakespeare’s notoriously tricky vernacular. The performances are also incredibly physical; some of the actors seem to do more running than one might spend doing an hour on the treadmill. One imagines that if you were to see this production again and again it would never become stale.
Whilst this particular staging of the play is coming to a close, it serves as a reminder of both Shakespeare’s endurance as a national treasure and the talent on offer at the RSC – something, being so close to Warwick University, we should surely appreciate.