E. and O.E.
HARLES COBURN’S _injudicious | Lamb’s-taling of The Comedy of Errors (2YA, November 2): left listeners | undecided as to whether their vicarious embarrassment was more for. Shakespeare or for Mr. Coburn. Identical twins and mistaken identities were vieux jeux when Plautus put them on the boards, and it was, to say the least of it, a little exuberant of the young Shakespeare to double the ration and square the resulting complications. Then along comes Mr.
Coburn, unchanged by the sound of him from the days when he acted bluff, boyish, simple-hearted and | simple-headed middle-agers in those early Deanna Durbin films, and proceeds to relate the barren tale with every ap-
pearance of enjoyment. No complication is too contrived for Mr. Coburn’s devoted unravelling, no situation so strained that he cannot wring a drop of unsophisticated enjoyment from it. "And then you see this Dromio (of Ephesus) meets Antipholus (of Syracuse) but of course he thinks it’s his master Antipholus of Ephesus (Ha-ha-HA!) and Antipholus (of Syracuse) thinks Dromio (of Ephesus) is his own Dromio (of Syracuse), Ha-ha-ha-ha-HA!" Even more sprightliness is imparted to the narrative by the use of the modern idiom (Coburn’s "girl-friend" for Shakespeare’s "courtesan") which gives the recital a spurious modernity while detracting still further (if possible) from
its verisimilitude.
M.
B.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 543, 18 November 1949, Page 15
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216E. and O.E. New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 543, 18 November 1949, Page 15
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