Comedy of Errors

Sir John Gilbert's 1849 painting: The Plays of Shakespeare,
containing scenes and characters from
several of William Shakespeare's plays.
Photo: Wickipedia

Makmiller and two of his friends drew to my attention that watching Shakespeare is hard, so hard that it is possible to come away without having understood enough of the play to have enjoyed it.

 I have been thinking about that point – that the 17th century language is hard to understand.

So hard to understand and still thirty-eight plays have been translated into every modern language.

Why do we keep seeing them, still today?

Since my ear was tuned into the difficulty of the language, given Makmiller’s point, I was noticing as well, how the original English language was getting in the way of my own fluency for the first part of the play.

Given all of the above, by the end of the first act I was laughing so hard that my shoulders were shaking.

Transferring the stage into a modern day setting – London, in fact -- was a brilliant move: the ambulance with its sirens, the street violence,  the troubadours now seen as a band, the Shakespearean traditional theatre now in the form of an three flour apartment.

And at the end? Was that #10 Downing Street that the actors were pouring in and out of?

I called Rebecca in London on other matters today, and Alex said that she had taken 10-year old Duncan and gone to the show.

Did he make it to the second act? And if he did, was he rolling on the ground with laughter as the rest of us were in our theatre.

We had something special happen in the last 5 minutes of the show. Our screen went blank and a computer pop-up said, the screen will now go blank in the next two minutes. Press yes, no or cancel. People in the theatre were yelling out, “Press cancel. Press cancel.” But someone in the screen room was too far away to hear us.

I had skimmed the plot summary before I left to go to the movies, and had also run my eye over a goggle search on “Comedy of Errors famous quotes”. I glanced through them and didn’t recognize any of them.

But the pre-show fast read must have helped, for I kept hearing the quotes pop up during the play.

Here are the ones I looked at:
• "The pleasing punishment that women bear."
- William Shakespeare - The Comedy of Errors, 1.1

• "A wretched soul, bruised with adversity."
- William Shakespeare - The Comedy of Errors, 2.1

• "Every why hath a wherefore."
- William Shakespeare - The Comedy of Errors, 2.2

• "Small cheer and great welcome makes a merry feast."
- William Shakespeare - The Comedy of Errors, 3.1

• "They brought one Pinch, a hungry lean-faced villain,
A mere anatomy, a mountebank,
A threadbare juggler, and a fortune-teller,
A needy, hollow.eyed, sharp-looking wretch,
A living-dead man."
- William Shakespeare - The Comedy of Errors, 5.1

• "Let's go hand in hand, not one before another."
- William Shakespeare - The Comedy of Errors, 5.1

Wasn’t that a great line to finish with!

 “Let’s go hand in hand, not one before the another.”

So sweet.

And now, dear reader, if you are still with me and were there at your own theatre tonight, you will know that I fell off of my seat in the previews to read that Love Never Dies is coming April 10th and 11th. That is my all-time favorite musical. I am going both nights. I paid regular price to get to that show in London so many times, and I can't be kept back from going at the greatly reduced price offered by the cinemas, as compared to the live stage.

Love Never Dies is playing in Australia now, but not in London or New York.  So we get to see it.

As well, Frankenstein is being rebroadcast in June – both versions, so how exciting is that.

And I didn’t know about Christopher Plummer’s Barrymore , a one-man show that was done in Toronto, let alone that it is also going to be broadcast. Apparently that is going to be run HD Live. Oh, life is sooo good if a person loves the theatre. My Google search didn’t line me up with the dates for that show and I didn’t catch it in the screen tonight.

Arta