Started As A Stopgap

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31003, 8 March 1966, Page 7

Started As A Stopgap

The Royal Shakespeare Company came to put on “The Comedy of Errors,” its biggest money-maker, I by accident. “We were going to do ‘King Lear’ with Paul Scofield, but he became ill, and as we couldn’t stretch the other plays to fill the days for ‘Lear’ we had to put on something else,” said Clifford Williams. “The difficulty at Stratford is finding a play that is new. Someone noticed that ‘The Comedy of Errors’ had not been done since 1926. The reason seemed to be that no-

one had ever thought it a good play. The critics, the academic ones, wrote it off as a poor apprentice comedy, and it was performed occasionally with the worst passages cut out to fill up a double bill. “When the idea was canvassed to put it on, it caught us on the hop as none of us knew it. We all rushed away and read it, even Peter Hall. I was not impressed at all. In fact, I couldn’t understand it. We held a conference to discuss it and the views we gave were all negative. I didn’t like it the most so they reasoned that I should be the one to do it. “It was a bit of a challenge. . . . SERIOUS THEME “In doing a Shakespeare play we must find what it intended and what its relevance is for us. Shakespeare should be regarded as a living dramatist who has something particular to say for us, who had something different to say to our parents, and will have something still different to say for our children. “What we discovered in ‘The Comedy of Errors’ was that the academics had failed to expose an underlying theme. We found there was a serious theme, but this was treated casually—the sacrament of marriage.” The play discussed the problem of three marriages. One was on the rocks because of what amounted to a sevenyear itch. In the second a ship landed on the rocks and split up with the husband at one end of the ship going one way and the wife at the other end. The third was an idealised renaissance marriage. The play treated them as a delightful trio of conflicts. Shakespeare’s settings in other plays all had a relevance and here the setting in Ephesus gave another clue. This was known in Elizabethan times as the centre of the cult of black magic in the ancient world as well as being the site of the Temple of Diana. The play was explicit id its treatment of black magic and the story was rooted in the conflict of humanism and paganism. “We approached it as a piece of serious writing—we didn’t muck it about at all and there’s not a line or

scene tampered with—and this approach really paid off. It was genuinely funny. BIG IMPACT Mr Williams said the impact of the production was so considerable that he had not found where the effect came from. Its appeal might have been because it was so extroverted when the rest of British theatre was predominantly concerned with the introverted type of character. The company was forced to keep its cheap, money-making stop-gap in the repertory, eventually took it on a world tour “and now it’s popping up everywhere.” “It’s almost my Frankenstein. I’ve staged it eight times, except in New Zealand which Gareth Morgan is doing, and each time it gets

harder. The production has an enormous reputation, and for that reason each time we do it again I'm terribly nervous in case the bubble will burst, in case a new audience will see through it. “The production should be changed. Some things are out of date now. But I would be scared to change them in case I removed the sure-fire elements and upset the balance which made it so successful. “This time I’m here in New Zealand to give it a friendly pat on the head like an affectionate godfather. Because Gareth did it there were a few little bits foreign to me, but in Wellington it went awfully well, and by the time it gets to Christchurch it will be a lot better.”