Town Hall Theatre, Galway
How seriously should you take a play that Shakespearean scholars generally place among his “earlier, funnier period”? Long before one character streaks naked through the auditorium, with a lit sparkler dangling from where the sun don’t shine, Propeller Theatre Company give their answer: Not entirely.
Director Edward Hall recognises a lark when he sees one. Here two sets of identical twins, separated at birth, cause havoc in downtown Ephesus as they circle each other unknowingly. A dialogue of incessant punning further thickens the plot contrivances of mistaken identity, so Propeller’s all-male company present Ephesus not as a brutally mercenary Greek town, but as a bawdy package holiday in Magaluf, where a mirthful chorus of boys in football shirts and sombreros play music, heckle loudly and generally resemble a punch-up in search of a chip shop.
There’s an arch critique in that presentation, especially when Shakespeare’s view of foreigners seems to pander to Elizabethan jingoism. When Antipholus of Syracuse (Dugald Bruce-Lockhart) asks his man-servant/jester where Ireland might be located on a woman’s body, Richard Frame’s expertly comic Dromio replies, “Marry, in her buttocks. I found it out by the bogs.” Under the multi-coloured fairy lights and junk-shop eclectic costumes of Michael Pavelka’s design, it’s hard to take any offence. But that may be the problem.
Just as the bright colour palette leads to super-saturation, and the artfully arranged live music and sound effects to overkill, so the show stresses every gag, ad-libs several more and loses the play’s darker traction. Jon Trenchard’s engaging Dromio of Ephesus may wring the audience for “aww”s when remonstrating against his lot, but it mutes a deeper comment on the cruelties of fate. Likewise, Robert Hands’s unwitting husband-swapper Adriana is an amusing parody of vexed womanhood – false eyelashes with a terrifying wingspan – but it smothers the casual betrayal of Sam Swainsbury’s Antipholus who spends the night with a prostitute and compensates his wife with a gold chain.
Hall playfully emphasises that grubby materialism: it’s not for nothing that even the simplest transactions here fall apart, that credit is in short supply and that a man will die if he can’t make his repayments. With minimal embellishment it could be a satire on the financial crisis, but Propeller’s spirited production plays it for easier laughs, from Dominic Tighe’s Village People police officer to Tony Bell’s possessed evangelist who even makes room for topical gags about Rebekah Brooks. It won’t stress the comedy of cultural anxiety and divided selves, but when it comes to Elizabethan precursors of “Yo momma’s so fat” jokes, it seldom errs.
Runs until Saturday
