Читать книгу The Comedy of Errors (Propeller Shakespeare) - William Shakespeare - Страница 11

Designing The Comedy of Errors

It is ironic that this play of happenstance and consequences, a precisely written farce, demands that the designer is doubly exacting and makes no human errors. Shakespeare delights in the form and The Comedy of Errors is as fresh as Feydeau and contemporary as Cooney, with just a dash of Joe Orton’s black humour. Comedies of this sort that, on the page, imply intense and precise physicality in the staging, require a design that maps out the action and anticipates the journey times from any given point on the stage to another. Entrances should be a surprise and exits swift. Aesthetically, they also need to take the audience into a familiar but not necessarily realistic world – hyper-reality perhaps, to match the escalating energy of the narrative in performance.

Propeller always tries to bring the sixteenth century closer to the twenty-first by overlaying the footprint of one upon the other and exploiting how Shakespeare’s characters negotiate the timeless human situations he has dealt them. In conceiving our unique world for the story, we had to find for ourselves an island community with its own laws and superstitions; as haunted as Prospero’s island and as potentially volatile as our own on a boozy Saturday night. Ephesus should therefore be a multicultural crossroads where all manner of unlikely folk are ‘washed up’ in all senses of the word and where eating, sex and commerce are the prime preoccupations of its entrapped population.

Scenic design for The Comedy of Errors

Obvious then: a run-down piazza in a run-down port in a Tenerife or Capri lookalike. Stags and Hens, police corruption and black market racketeering are the everyday and anyone can lose themselves in the margarita-fuelled 24/7 holiday spirit. Lookalike–everything looks like it might be the real thing, but it has become a fantasy island. The clothes are an eclectic pan-European mix and the locals merge into the shadows behind aviator sunglasses, under the brims of sombreros.

Costume designs for The Comedy of Errors

Shakespeare’s usual implicit arrangement of three entrances, set into a single upstage tiring house with a central balcony above, is a formula for the scenic architecture that designers ignore at their and the production’s peril. Propeller’s Ephesus mirrored this exact plan so that exits and entrances stretched an entering actor’s journey across the stage, allowing for plenty of time to improvise en route, before building up a dangerous head of steam to make a super-fast exit. Doors themselves rarely play a big part in Shakespeare’s staging, but they are great for farce, of course. So our design of three double-height metal shop front shutters splashed with undecipherable scribble and inset doors that smacked shut with an echoing rattle, helped fuel the production’s urban frenzy.

Michael Pavelka