It’s the usual old muddle. You take a Shakespeare classic and you time-travel it to an alien century, usually the present one, which has no connection with its historic setting. The plan, we’re always told, is to generate that supremely irrelevant attribute, ‘relevance’.
Director Dominic Cooke has fast-forwarded The Comedy of Errors to modern London and I have to confess it works extremely well. For once, it’s OK to have wrong-era costumes and juggled chronologies and a visual setting that’s out of whack with the literary context because Cooke is simply mimicking Shakespeare. The Bard nicked a Roman favourite, The Menaechmi of Plautus, and dolled it up in the culture and lingo of London’s red-light district, Southwark. And the two time zones harmonise very neatly.
Which is not to say the play is easy to enjoy. The insane plot, involving two capering sets of identical twins, unfolds like a geometric exercise with a storyline that escalates into ever higher planes of barminess and befuddlement. It takes huge mental efforts to maintain your credulity. Or, to put it another way, you have to remind yourself why the funny thing that just happened was funny. The cast are required to pull off at least 45 outraged comic grimaces apiece.
Lenny Henry, as Antipholus, is well suited to this sort of lightweight knockabout. Henry can be anything on stage other than serious. When he reaches for gravity he becomes instantly weightless and here he ambles about like a harmlessly lovable honey-monster. (He’s less adept at just standing still and not acting while others are speaking their lines, but that’s a minor fault.)
Claudie Blakley and Michelle Terry play Adriana and Luciana as a pair of hard-faced Essex slappers. Great stuff. And both of the Dromios (Daniel Poyser and Lucian Msamati) bring a flavour of sorrowful grandeur to their roles. The handling is relentlessly infantile. The biffings and punch-ups are fun to watch but some of the orchestrated mayhem just gets silly. At one point Cooke makes the entire cast chase each other around the Olivier on kids’ scooters while the set twirls in the contrary direction. Subtle character comedy, rather than out-and-out buffoonery, is his natural terrain. Let’s hope he returns to it soon.
Aladdin, at the Lyric Hammersmith, is a panto with a lot more moral content than it realises. The writers have unwisely chosen to make the title character a London rioter. He appears at curtain-up with a sack of looted confectionery. To soften our hostility he tries to excuse himself. ‘Ah only wanted tuh borrow dem tings for a coupla years.’ Clearly this Aladdin has been through the system and knows, like all seasoned thieves, that he needs to circumvent the key clause of the Theft Act, ‘the intention permanently to deprive of use’.
Later, he denies his crime altogether and awards himself the virtue of economic altruism. ‘I looted dem sweets just to spread der welf a bit.’ It’s hard to warm to this anarchic hypocrite. And it gets harder when he sets forth his philosophy in the unappealing anthem, ‘I wanna be a billionaire so freakin bad.’ Secretly one hopes he’ll fail to woo Princess Karen whose ethical views are diametrically opposed to his.
Her signature tune is the number one hit, ‘Price Tag’, by the Cornish musician Jessie J. This amazingly catchy pop song has the unusual virtue of moral integrity. Perhaps you’ve heard it sizzling from tinny speakers in some café or supermarket. ‘It ain’t about the money, money, money. We don’t need your money, money, money. We just want to make the world dance. Forget about the price tag.’ Listen to the lyrics all the way through and you’ll hear an angry, bitter, mocking denunciation of materialism and its tempting fripperies. But the panto’s authors seem oblivious to the mismatch between Aladdin and his princess. They just throw them together and let them fall in love and bung them on to a miraculousflying carpet that swings out over the audience.
The real star of the show is Widow Twanky played with bundles of mischievous charm by Shaun Prendergast. He brings a Max Miller-ish insolence to the stage as he works the crowd. ‘They say marriage is a lottery. At least in a lottery you’ve got a chance!’ In support, Steven Webb is an outstanding Wishy Washy. One health warning. Quite a few distraught three-year-olds had to be escorted to a place of safety during the show after succumbing to baddie-related stress. The zestful devilishness of Simon Kunz, as Abenazer, and the spooky
distortions of the costumes (achieved with great panache by Tom Scutt) are likely to scare the toddlers in nappies. If you bring little ones make an exit-plan when you arrive.
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