Giving Shakespeare His Sombrero and Kazoo

THEATER REVIEW | ‘THE COMEDY OF ERRORS’

NEW YORK TIMES

By Ben Brantley

David Newman, left, and Robert Hands in “The Comedy of Errors.”

Propeller, the all-male British theater troupe that routinely turnsShakespeare into a donnybrook, has never hesitated to hit below the belt. Or above it, or behind it, or right in the buckle. But it has surely never landed as many blows as it does in its relentlessly punch-drunk production of “The Comedy of Errors,” which runs through March 27 at the Harvey Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Edward Hall’s eye-popping staging of this early Shakespeare comedy works its way through a wide vocabulary of martial arts moves — boxing jabs, swift kicks to the rear, karate chops, wrestling locks — and weapons that include nightsticks,nunchaku sticks, whips, dinner plates and cans of mace. Yet despite such variety, an air of sameness soon pervades the ancient town of Ephesus, as if one were watching an endless loop of a particularly frenzied episode of “The Itchy and Scratchy Show” from “The Simpsons.” With a lively mariachi band setting the rhythms for this production, it’s not only the beat that goes on and on; the beatings do too.

In the past Propeller has used its no-holds-barred approach to surprisingly unsettling and illuminating effect. Their twinned interpretations of “The Taming of the Shrew” and “Twelfth Night” (seen at the Brooklyn Academy in 2007) brought out a cruelty in those works that most directors choose to finesse and that made us think twice about what we reflexively laugh at.

But if ever a play didn’t cry out for this company’s brand of man-handling, it’s “The Comedy of Errors.” Scaling up the brutality in what is Shakespeare’s most purely farcical work is like putting Charlie Sheen on a heavy diet of steroids. There’s more than enough testosterone to begin with. And since a Keystone Kops style of mayhem has been the default setting for “Errors” for many decades, the more startling approach would have been to turn down the violence and look for the poetry. The slapstick can almost automatically take care of itself.

As it is, this tale of the chaos and confusion inspired by the convergence of two long-separated sets of identical twins has been given inspired touches of theatrical ingenuity, though they are often overwhelmed by the nonstop punching and shouting. Mr. Hall and the designer Michael Pavelka have reconceived Ephesus as a sort of Tijuana-type border town, a place where guys go to get drunk, get lucky and get lost.

When Antipholus of Syracuse (Dugald Bruce-Lockhart) arrives here in search of his long-lost brother, accompanied by his servant, Dromio (Richard Frame), he finds that festive, presumably potent drinks keep materializing out of nowhere. So does a tribe of musicians wearing sombreros, who provide a stream of mood-reflecting melody. These strolling troubadours create the senses-blurring element through which all the characters swim, and they’re the best thing in the show.

Traditionally the biggest problem in staging “Errors” is its demand for two pairs of actors who can pass for mirror images of each other. Mr. Hall’s production solves this quite nicely. He introduces the four twins in the play’s opening scene by having them materialize as a kind of illuminated Exhibit A, when the travel-weary Aegeon (John Dougall), tells the story of how he lost his sons.

Mr. Bruce-Lockhart and Mr. Frame, as the visiting Antipholus and Dromio, and Sam Swainsbury and Jon Trenchard as the home-town Ephesian characters of the same names, have been attired and coiffed to such distinctively lurid effect that you don’t really look beyond the surface. Each set of twins is dressed identically (as this improbable story demands), and that first superficial double image sticks with you.

Antipholus of Syracuse is a brooding bachelor, given to reflections on identity; Antipholus of Ephesus is a hedonistic married man, given to buying bling and consorting with prostitutes. But they share a tendency to beat up their manservants when they feel they are being disrespected or misinformed. Both Dromios complain often of being treated as whip-scarred beasts of burden.

n this version, though, it isn’t only the Dromios who come in for hard treatment. Physical abuse appears to be the lingua franca of Ephesus. Antipholus of Ephesus’s jealous wife, Adriana (Robert Hands), keeps S&M toys in the bedroom; Luciana (David Newman) her virgin sister, has evidently studied jiujitsu, and the head of the town priory, the abbess Aemelia (Chris Myles) dresses like a dominatrix and brandishes a riding crop.

A policeman (Dominic Tighe) has his own nightstick pushed up his rectum, while another (a conjurer, played by Tony Bell, and tediously embodied here as a Texas-style evangelist) suffers having a lighted sparkler inserted in the same orifice. And of course instances of old-fashioned fisticuffs are legion. The best parts of these acts of violence are the ways in which they are aurally annotated by different musical sounds. (The kazoo and the xylophone are particularly well deployed.)

The cast members sustain a high level of vigor, though they let their costumes do most of their character definition. Mr. Bruce-Lockhart, a loutish Petruchio in Propeller’s “Shrew,” makes an impression by showing his (relatively) sensitive side as the addled Antipholus of Syracuse. And he and Mr. Frame, as his Dromio, are very funny executing what is perhaps the ultimate “How fat is she?” routine.

Since nearly all the characters exist in a state of high exasperation, they tend to speak fast and frantically. This means that some of what they say will be incomprehensible to theatergoers unfamiliar with the text. What with problems of inaudibility afflicting the Broadway revival of Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia,” imported British-born productions would seem to be in surprising need of elocution lessons.