the comedy of errors
the stratford festival
the national post

Richard Monette's last Shakespeare production at Stratford falls into a category that I don't remember ever encountering: the Self- Administered Insult.

For years now, people have been glibly accusing Monette of mounting gag-laden, over-the-top productions of practically everything. The allegations have continued despite a string of good- to-excellent shows that answered to that description in no way whatsoever: King Lear, The Tempest, The School for Scandal, The Importance of Being Earnest, Troilus and Cressida, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Henry VIII, Henry IV Part One, Edward II I could go on. So, he might have decided that if the label of irresponsible farceur were to be hung around his neck regardless, then he may as well earn it. He may have reasoned that The Comedy of Errors, an actual farce that he had already directed with some success several years back, would be the ideal vehicle. If those were really his thoughts, I sympathize. But he was very, very wrong.

The moment that best sums up the show comes when Aegeon, the Syracusan merchant condemned to death for arriving ransomless in the hostile city of Ephesus, is paraded through the streets, accompanied only by the Duke (a surprisingly minimal escort for a man on death row) and carrying a placard that reads "My End Is Near." He turns it around, to reveal a picture of the departing Monette himself. Ha, ha.

In a similar vein, we get a property camel borrowed from My One and Only and labelled accordingly, and a reference to the scarcity of tickets for Oklahoma! There's also an actor who crosses the stage in a penguin suit emblazoned with the words "for the critics." Sorry; I can't speak for the other guys, but I only like penguins onstage when they're real. These self-referential japes might pass muster on the last night of the run. They might even, conceivably, have raised some indulgent laughter on the first night (though they didn't). What audiences in between will make of them I cannot imagine.

Maybe the gags wouldn't matter if they were isolated moments in a production that otherwise offered a focused and inventive account of the play (though such a production wouldn't have included them in the first place), but Monette doesn't seem to trust his author an inch. Everything is sent up, though the first rule of farce -- which I have never seen successfully broken -- is that everything has to be taken seriously. Otherwise, it isn't funny.

Aegeon's death-sentence shouldn't be funny; it's the real deal that frames all the craziness.

The Comedy of Errors is the play about two sets of identical twins -- two masters named Antipholus, two slaves named Dromio -- separated at birth, turning up as young adults in the same city and constantly being mistaken for one another, until every person in town suspects every other person of having gone mad. Nobody wants a reverential production; the best production I ever saw was done as a musical, and it wasn't The Boys from Syracuse. But the actors have to believe in the situations, or we won't. They should not be wasting their time and ours by signalling what rubbish they think it all is.

The show is a compendium of unfunny gags, with no roots in character or situation. The Duke of Ephesus can't pronounce his city's name without getting his sibilants soaked, and the conjuror Dr. Pinch emerges, after an elaborate buildup from both script and staging, as a robed nonentity whose comic presence is zero. The acting in general is at as low an ebb as I remember at Stratford.

One of Monette's unacknowledged strengths has always been the basic one of making sense of the text. He seems to have given up on it this time. Allegra Fulton renders about 50% of the jealous Adriana's lines incomprehensible, while Sophia Walker as her ingenue sister raises that score to somewhere around 90%. There are a few survivors. Tom McCamus, who arrives late, brings a welcome burst of energy and efficiency as the resident Antipholus. Bruce Dow makes the visiting Dromio's anatomizing of the spherical kitchen-wench, a geography lesson in herself, into a pleasantly salty vaudeville routine. He and his twin (Steve Ross) share an affecting reunion scene that's moving even at the very end of a production like this. Back at the very beginning, Brian Tree delivers Aegeon's long tale of woe with a dry doggedness in misery that I liked. I also confess to a weakness for the Greek tragic chorus that oohs and aahs its way through his trial before rousing itself to deliver the most famous of Greek tragic tags, the one about calling no man happy until he is dead. It doesn't connect to anything that follows, but it was fun. That, though, was before I realized that the whole evening was going to be like that.

Did I mention the mechanical Komedy Kat that chases a real dog in between scenes to which neither of them has any connection? I guess it's an apt motif for a show that's just one non sequitur not following another.