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Music in The Comedy of Errors

Somehow the identity of the ensemble in Propeller’s The Comedy of Errors ended up as a mariachi band. This fitted Edward Hall’s idea that the play be set in a cheesy Spanish holiday island for Brits, where raucous eighties pop anthems and loud football shirts ruled, ok. Mariachi not only suited the company’s instrumental talents – we already played guitar, accordion, violins, brass – but also provided the perfect medium for us to play electronic eighties tunes accoustically, as well as giving the required atmosphere of heat, holidays, hilarity, and hot tempers.

Before the show, the whole company improvised background music in a latin style, including Deve Ser Amor and Bossa Dorado. The second half opened similarly with the Officer singing to a lady in the audience The Girl From Ipanema. Mariachi classics, Cielito Lindo and The Mexican Hat Song introduced Syracuse. And Antipholus of Ephesus’s drunken nights with the Courtesan were accompanied by a brash brass quintet of When The Saints Go Marching In. Gloria Estefan’s Conga closed the first half, and then the cast trooped front of house for the interval to raise money for Children In Need by singing eighties classics arranged Mexican-style by yours truly, including a medley of Eurythmics songs and a fourteen-songs-in-four-minutes a capella megamix.

The eighties theme continued into the progressively frenetic second half: Antipholus of Syracuse’s wonder at strangers saluting him as ‘their well-acquainted friend’ was accompanied by That’s The Way (I Like It), their offer of ‘commodities to buy’ by Dire Straits’ I want my MTV, or Spandau Ballet’s Gold (we would decide which on the day). And for Pinch’s entrance, I wrote words and music for a madcap Gospel number loosely based on The Old Landmark, to go with the idea that the ‘Conjurer’ was an Evangelist Preacher.

The music was generally designed to punctuate the action as quickly as possible, so as to help rather than hinder the rhythm and velocity of the text. This was especially true of the stings and stabs from what we called ‘percussion corner’. The violence in Comedy was to be cartoon, so we had a whole barrel of slapsticks, cymbals, cowbells, and woodblocks for the job, and the fun in rehearsals was to decide which sound was best for a hit to the head or which for a punch to the stomach. A glockenspiel was ‘dinged’ every time the ‘chain’ was mentioned. This heightened the madness as the plot got faster and more furious.

Jon Trenchard