Ribald, raw comedy

By Shajeev Wanigasekara

The Watermill Company's interpretation of William Shakespeare's "Comedy of Errors" at the Lionel Wendt was absolutely riotous: a galvanised, joyful performance veering zanily across culture and sub-culture in two and a half hours of raw energy that left the audience weak at the knees from laughing.

The experience (to call this a 'play' would be an injustice) begins well before the lights go down. In the spirit of "theatre sans frontiers" the players are already in character and mill about strumming guitars, walking about on stilts and muttering gibberish at the audience as they enter the Wendt, reminiscent more of a medieval fair than a Shakespeare. Once the audience starts settling into their seats the cast work the crowd, interacting with some, singing, waving and yelling pleasantries back and forth at the others.

The performance is - and there really is no better term to describe this - schizoid. Passages of the Bard's finest delivered in the best traditions of luvviedom wherever actors are wont to play Shakespeare are punctuated with slapstick, kazoos, whistles, drums, guitars, cymbals, violins, the kitchen sink and even duck calls. Aegeon takes the centre of the stage moving the watchers to tears of sadness with his tale of woe while around him the rest of the cast cavort and caper in rubber Spitting Image masks, moving the watchers to tears of laughter with their three stooges impressions, ridiculous expressions and cries of 'ooh' and 'aah' whilst scooting around the stage on their behinds.

This brand of mayhem continues unabashed throughout the performance. It is clear that Shakespeare is not the sole inspiration here; characters that could so easily be stodgily played are brought to life by incorporating aspects of cinema (freeze framing the action while one of the players talk to the audience in asides), Monty Python (Nell, the 'spherical' scullery maid), WWF wrestling (practically every single punch, kick, slap, tweak and forearm smash), Dumb and Dumber/Laurel & Hardy (the two Dromios) and all the Daffy Duck cartoons ever made (the comical expressions, plummeting sounds, duck calls, raspberries, demented mugging and those glorious glorious windmilling chases around the stage). If only one of the characters had gone "woohoowoohoowoohoo" now and then...

The performances were highly polished and so spontaneous that it almost seemed like improvised comedy at times. Come to think of it, there may well have been some improv influence there too! Particularly impressive was the fact that no one stage was just there at any time; even the bit part players sitting around the periphery of the action were always contributing, be it a facial expression, a posture of the body or the playing of the various sound effect instruments. Scenes such as the one in which Adriana is complaining about Antipholus to Luciana who is commiserating with her are made absolutely hilarious by the background players who punctuate each comment with the tok of a drum or the ting of a triangle and follow the dialogue with their heads swivelling back and forth between the sisters, much like the crowd in the background of the Wimbledon singles finals watching the ball from one side of the net to the other.

The two Antipholus' were very good but the limelight belonged to David Acton who played Adriana. Picture Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, multiply it by ten and you may come close to this performance. The fake eyelashes fluttered, the hand windmilled about in extravagant gestures, the body contorted this way and that and the voice reached hitherto undiscovered octaves as Adriana minced and flounced about the stage in undoubtedly the campest of camp performance seen on stage in Sri Lanka. Playing the role fey instead of female was a master stroke and underlines the innovative spin the company put on the production.

The multiple personality of the show continued into the music too; alternatively Mediterranean, Eastern European, Country & Western, Irish Folk, Gypsy Kings and Beatnik (check out Antipholus of Ephesus' coool drum beats and beat poetry as he revels with his mates), the highlight of the musical output had to be the strumming of The Animals' "House of the Rising Sun" on guitars as Aegeon is led on stage by a hangman's noose around his neck at the culmination of the performance.

The Watermill Company injects a whole lot of fun into the proceedings. Too often Shakespeare - even the comedies - are performed in an entirely rigid manner, the players so caught up in the notion that Shakespeare is classical and serious that they forget the meaning of "comedy". This production was ribald, crude and shamelessly used gimmickry to underline, enhance the prose; which is probably exactly what Shakespeare intended when he wrote this innuendo-laden Comedy of Errors.

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