The Comedy of Errors is ‘perfect’ play for today!
The Royal Shakespeare Company is opening an outdoor theatre for the staging of a production postponed from last year. Director Phillip Breen tells us more...
This production will be the first live theatre performance to welcome audiences back to the Royal Shakespeare Company, opening the newly built Garden Theatre. How do you feel about that?
It’d have taken a brave man to have predicted that, when we did a stagger through of the play in our Clapham rehearsal room on Friday 13th March 2020, the production would never play in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, and would, instead, eventually see the light of day in a purpose built outdoor theatre on the banks of the Avon in July 2021. But that’s what has happened.
Of course – in the context of a very hard year for the theatre in general and our company specifically – I feel very excited about it. I know the company feels a great sense of responsibility. I know audiences are excited, as they tell me all the time. It’s hard not to feel a little daunted, but we’ll just put one foot in front of the other, take it day by day and prepare for opening night as we always would, while also knowing this will not be like any opening night we have ever experienced.
You’ve said that this play seems “entirely apt’’ for this moment. What is it about the play that makes it perfect as the first show to welcome audiences back with?
This is a play in which families are reunited after a long period apart, in the open air, at sunset. The madness in the play comes from the characters’ isolation. In the final act, peace and sanity is restored because, ultimately, we don’t organically know who we are, and we only know who we are because of other people... I know that bit of myself through my girlfriend, that bit of myself through my old schoolfriend, that bit through my uncle and so on. It’s only when all of these characters see each other in the flesh and they can share their own bit of the story, that they start to feel whole again.
It’s a play about the fragility of the self; how quickly and profoundly we can lose ourselves when we lose touch with people. It’s about how close we all are to chaos despite our best efforts at convincing ourselves otherwise. It’s about what happens when the world stops behaving like it used to, and everything feels indefinably strange and out of kilter – it looks like the world you know, but doesn’t feel like the world you know.
In the play there’s a woman who’s been in self-isolation for 33 years (in a nunnery), a woman whose husband starts to act out of character and she starts to rather like it. There’s a madness to the play – all of which chimes with people’s experience of the last year or so.
How have you managed to rehearse the show under the current restrictions?
It’s not been too bad. Rachael Barber, our Covid marshall, has been strict, understanding and innovative and put us to the least inconvenience possible whilst keeping everyone safe. The whole of the RSC has been brilliant and very
helpful. There’s a lot to think about, of course.
We’ve been rehearsing on the stage of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre which has been exciting, and which we would never normally do. But it’s been good to prepare us for playing outside, as it’s a very big space with a high ceiling.
There’s a lot we all have to learn from this period, which would be good to make permanent, such as improved hygiene and being aware of not passing on colds etc., But there’s also a lot of stuff that I hope we can unlearn as quickly as we have learned it. I never want to get used to Zoom rehearsals and ‘social distancing’ in theatres.
What are the challenges of staging a production outdoors?
Both indoors and outdoors bring their own restrictions and challenges. I mainly feel, in the circumstances, that performing it outside is the best thing for the play and the moment – emphasising a shared space, actors being able to see the audience as well as hearing them. It might make the audience feel differently about their relationship with the play when they are not sat in a dark room merely observing it, but more actively participating in it. It’ll certainly help the actors feel
that everything they are doing is live. You lose a bit with stage lighting of course, in terms of your ability to focus the gaze of an audience, and help with mood, but we now have to find new and interesting ways to do that through what’s on the page. It’ll be vocally more challenging, but the actors will rely on their training and the brilliant RSC voice department.
Can you tell us more about the setting of your production?
In short there’s no precise setting, just a series of instincts and observations expressed in the design of our ‘Ephesus’. Our ‘Ephesus’ draws on the Gulf states’ economic boom, their international citizenry, and their political structures, the sounds and smells of the multi-ethinic, multi-faith world of Istanbul, all through an Eighties lens of high concept comedy, slapstick, and surprise wisdom, inflected with the dark dissociative surrealism of David Lynch. A place of strange dreams in which you might actually go mad, and might eventually find yourself.
The Comedy of Errors runs in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Lydia & Manfred Gorvy Garden Theatre between July 13 and September 26. rsc.org.uk, 01789 331111