Providing The Catalyst For Shakespeare

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31001, 5 March 1966, Page 24

Providing The Catalyst For Shakespeare

"The Press” Special Service WELLINGTON, Mar. 3. If mood and atmosphere alone could count, the success of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre production of “The Comedy of Errors” was assured from the moment the National Anthem in period harmony sounded across the empty set in the Wellington Opera House. Assurance of success mounted as the play and its embellishments unfolded their dual fascination. This production has two facets. One is the play that Shakespeare wrote, a bright, ingenious little comedy of much charm and little moment. The other is the evocation of Ephesus as a city of magic and sorcery, brilliantly achieved by Clifford Williams in this original production and splendidly redirected by Gareth Morgan for this first theatrical venture by the New Zealand Theatre Centre. To say that Clifford Williams’s miming additions, lavishly assisted by Anthony Powell’s costumes, are the ingredients of the play’s great appeal would be to underrate his theatrical integrity. What they do is to act as a catalyst, enlivening the acting and sharpening the audience’s perceptions, yet leaving Shakespeare to speak for himself on a set consisting of nothing more than three receding platforms raised one above th| next

And because this is still Shakespeare and not a producer’s conception of him, the actors remain the mainstay of the evening’s entertainment. In spite of being drawn from England, Australia and New Zealand they revealed themselves above all as a team, so that one never shone with a brighter light than another. Good as they were, Briony Hodge, as Adrian, and Lewis Fiander, as Antipholus of Syracuse, could be said to head the cast only because Shakespeare offered them most of the limelight.

Weaving with them the strands of this tangled web Were -John Rye, as Antipholus of Ephesus, Barbara Ewing as Luciana, Jonathan Hardy and Bruce Myles as the two Dromios and, to mention just three of the resident New Zealanders, Peter Bland as Aegeon, Pat Evison as his wife, Aemillia, and Ken Tillson as a riotously comic Pinch. Much more deserves mention, the costumes and properties from Stratford-Upon-Avon, the music by Peter Wishart, but this is so much a cooperative effort that individuals and identifications cease to matter. What does matter is that this version of “The Comedy of Errors” should continue along the course its

auspicious launching last night. It carries with it a cargo of high hopes and aspirations for the future of permanent professional theatre in New Zealand.