Classic Shakespeare tale gets LGBTQ twist
Short, sharp and queer.
Words not usually associated with Shakespeare’s plays, they are nonetheless useful in describing Keira Loughran’s adventurous production of the early farce “The Comedy of Errors.”
This is a quintessential mistaken-identity story: two sets of twins were separated at birth and grew up in different cities, Syracuse and Ephesus. In both pairs there’s a master named Antipholus and a servant named Dromio. Now the Syracusans have come to Ephesus and are quickly mistaken for their doppelgangers; misunderstandings start to pile up. It’s Shakespeare’s briefest play and here runs at a lively 95 minutes without intermission.
Loughran’s first twist is that Antipholus (Jessica B. Hill) and Dromio (Beryl Bain) of Syracuse are female and played by women; in Ephesus, they pretend to be men. In fact, this disguise is probably unnecessary, for (second twist) Ephesus is a haven of openness to people living whatever way they wish. In the program, Loughran calls the production an homage to transgender and gender-fluid communities.
This is signalled rather gloriously from the first scene, which presents us with a Duke (Juan Chioran) who dresses as a woman and no one bats an eye. Embracing Chioran’s tall stature, designer Joanna Yu has him in a blue gown with a militarylike bodice, and a slit skirt revealing a sky-high fishnetted leg and an over-the-knee suede boot. It’s sexy, it’s eye-catching, and initially it discombobulates — what’s up with this place? Yu’s costumes throughout are a highlight, colourful and witty.
In fact, the twins’ genders don’t dominate the shenanigans and
the cross-gender casting for me aided comprehension, because I knew from the beginning which twin was which, while in traditional productions it can take time to tell the actors apart.
The Syracusan pair immediately become embroiled in the lives of their Ephesian counterparts: soon after Antipholus of Syracuse sends her Dromio off to a hotel with a big box of money, she encounters the other Dromio (Josue Laboucane), who doesn’t know a thing about the cash.
Antipholus of Ephesus (Qasim Khan), as befitting of the place, is sexually adventurous — a subplot
revolves around him giving one piece of jewelry to his wife, Adriana (Alexandra Lainfiesta), and another to his Courtesan, played as a trans woman by Sébastien Hines.
Queer desire also comes to figure in Antipholus of Syracuse’s exchanges with Adriana’s sister Luciana (Amelia Sargisson). In their getting-to-knowyou scene, there is a double sort of intrigue — Luciana believes she’s flirting with her brother-inlaw, whom she thought she knew, and two women are drawn together through sexual attraction.
Loughran and her company
have pushed the boat out with this production, which is welcome, but things could also have been taken further.
While on the one hand they’ve removed the emphasis on master-servant violence that makes the play somewhat distasteful in contemporary terms (in the script the Antipholi are constantly whaling on the Dromii), there’s an undercurrent of BDSM that invites more exploration. The opening night audience loved it when Sarah Dodd’s Abbess chided Adriana for not being “rough enough” with her straying husband, and the staging hints at
kink when everyone gets bound up by a big whip toward the end.
In the script, the Ephesians are wilder and more aggressive than the Syracusans, and Laboucane and Khan run with their great roles and provide the evening’s best moments through their acute line readings and physical humour. Although Hill and Bain are engaging as the more thoughtful pair, having the women be more sensitive than the men plays into stereotypes that the production otherwise seems spoiling to explode.
And while Heins gives a compelling performance as the elegant, confident Courtesan, the next step for Stratford will be the hiring of trans actors for trans roles. A final question has to do with the play’s framing story, in which Egeon, a merchant from Syracuse (Gordon Patrick White), is sentenced to death by the Duke, a reflection of aggressions between the two cities.
But given Ephesus’s permissiveness and the Duke’s own evident openness to difference, why not let Egeon go free?
Because otherwise there’d be no play, of course.
The production builds and builds to some genuinely hilarious moments, none more so than a ridiculous sequence involving the quack magician Dr. Pinch (Rod Beattie) who is brought in to conjure sense into Antipholus of Syracuse but proves the biggest basket case of them all.