Review: A Comedy Of Errors

The Comedy of Errors was put on by By Any Other Name Theatre Company at UEA last week. Performances were intended for the music school’s amphitheatre but given the weather that didn’t work out as planned.

The play is set in a Summer party city of the 1990s, and the show’s main novelty is its live renditions of cheesy 90s hits. These include Saturday Night, C’est la Vie and Vengaboys’s immortal Boom Boom Boom Boom (I Want You In My Room). The music is fairly suited to the play, Errors a light-hearted farce, but the performance is too dependent on it, especially early on.

Of course, this is all Wednesday’s audience sees because a quarter of the way through the performance it starts raining and twenty minutes later, once everyone is thoroughly soaked, the show is stopped for fifteen minutes and then cancelled altogether. The audience is invited to the two remaining shows for free. When most are shivering, many cannot make the other shows, and, perplexingly, the indoor space hired for such conditions isn’t being used, it’s easy to become dispirited with the production.

It’s also unfortunate because Thursday’s performance is significantly stronger than Wednesday’s and many don’t seem to have returned. Regardless, it’s indoors this time and despite the dreary room, a confined performance space makes the singing feel stronger and seems to complement the busyness of the play.

Despite a slow start, the play improves as it goes on. The audience has to put up with a long, bland exposition during which, presumably to compensate, music is played. When used as transitional devices, songs were fun and successfully energised the performance. Background music, on the other hand, often felt like a bit of a distraction technique during weaker, less imaginative scenes.

The show hits its stride around the halfway mark, the pacing spot on and the script’s humour handled well, leading to some very funny scenes. These moments prove the casting of one actor per twin to be a good decision for the show. Michael Clarke and Ed Jones are both consistently good in the roles, their swaps in characterisation excellent and their ‘posher’ characters the dominant and more entertaining of their portrayals.

Performances in the show generally are good, most consistently Sophie Greenham’s, although the accents severely compromise diction. As in all Shakespeare, the standard was highest when actors made the script’s meaning clear. Grace Church and Ed Jones were notably confident with this.

This interpretation radically intensified the play’s silly, whimsical nature to create something entertaining but very far from the original Shakespeare. Although almost entirely successful within these creative parameters, the performance did contain a few gimmicky moments; a male cast member is put into a dress for a cheap laugh, and Shakespearean verse is rapped to Destiny’s Child’s Say My Name with an overblown dance routine.

Altogether, the show was fun and frivolous but Wednesday’s far poorer performance and the lack of preparation for foul weather betrayed a lack of professionalism, giving an unsavoury impression. Thursday’s show, however, was an enjoyable experience and showed a strong creative interpretation which ultimately paid off, providing an amusing and involving production.