The Comedy of Errors, Garden Theatre, 11th September 2021

 

Live Shakespeare is back, the same but different.  In Stratford, the current run of The Comedy of Errors is being performed in the imposing, outdoor Lydia & Manfred Gorvy Garden Theatre.  The RSC states that it is 'a ready-made, sustainable theatre which can be reassembled for other uses in the future'.  Presumably they mean, when pestilence strikes again.  But so it has always been with theatres, the original Globe having been moved from the north bank of the Thames, over the water to Southwark, its current resting place.  Theatres, more than most establishments, have to be able to adapt to the demands of the zeitgeist.  And so it was that the outdoor theatre added something organic and alive to the performance that I went to see.  The daddy long legs that darted into your hair as they were caught in a frenzied dance in the theatre spot lights seemed evidence of the charged air that the performance, and its audacity, created.  When we were seated at 6.30pm we had to wait a further thirty minutes for the show to start due to microphone issues.  How exciting, to be part of something so precarious.

The RSC has pulled out all the stops with this interpretation of The Comedy of Errors, looking to give one thing only to its post-pandemic, much-needed audience: Laughter.  It delivers with bells on.  From the very opening, the sophistication was obvious, as Ephesus was a creation that might be loosely seen as 1980's Dubai meets Dynasty, which, given the themes of money and trade that form the backdrop to the main plot, was inspired and apt.  In his telling of his own story of shipwreck and heartbreak, Egeon's words are set to life by the other cast members who sway in unison to indicate that they are aboard ship.  Straight away, these clever tricks of storytelling help to make the plotting of the play very clear.  Because, the great danger of the mistaken identity plays is that the audience becomes too confused in the ensuing plot confusion.  And the confusion was displayed with energy, innovation but above all, joy.  The cast seemed to be having the time of their lives and it was infectious, the audience gave it right back to them with whoops and applause throughout.

There were many notable scenes of humour, in fact, if the text allowed it, there was a play on words in every scene.  If not there was slap stick farce and ridiculous costumes to keep up the comedy.  Alfred Clay's Doctor Pinch as yoga instructor/charlatan is hard to forget, his tiny hot pants a source of humour in their own right.  Equally, the restaurant scene, in which Dyfrig Morris, as waiter, nearly loses his toupee in Antipholus' supper was pulled off with such Monty Pythonesque straight acting that the audience was rendered hysterical.

    "There's no time for a man to recover his hair that grows bald by nature."

Too.  Much.

Play within a play was used to brilliant effect when Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse discuss the kitchen wench.  Both characters acquired microphones and performed the lines as if they were delivering a stand-up comedy routine.  At one point, Antipholus asked the audience to bear with them as the jokes were over 400 years old.  It worked.  It was new and it worked.  The RSC has to innovate but sometimes they miss the mark.  Not this time.

Director Phillip Breen, on learning that his Aemilia (Hedydd Dylan), was pregnant and due in December, decided to incorporate her physical state into the performance.  This worked so well that I heard a couple, on leaving the theatre discussing this and deciding that it must be a fake bump and part of the play's text.  You can see why they would think this.  Aemilia being pregnant becomes like a ticking bomb to the great confusion of the play.  Given her condition, her increasingly erratic and wild diatribes to Antipholus seem entirely understandable.  It seemed to give her a licence to ramp up the crazy another notch.  Dylan was the shining light of the cast and, knowing that her bump was real, I genuinely feared that the exertion (at one point she adopts a side plank and if you know, you know!) she put into the performance might result in her going into labour on stage.  I'm sure Breen had a strategy for that as well.

The Comedy of Errors is a play that has a lot to say about madness and identity.  The madness gives a lot of laughs but it is the resolution and reunion at the end that render our characters whole.  It is a profoundly hopeful play and the perfect choice to open the season and resume our new normal.

The mid-life bikini selfie

 

I read with interest a recent article by Polly Vernon for the Sunday Times in which she tells of how she loses approximately fifty followers whenever she shares a picture of herself in a bikini.  More specifically, she loses female followers.

Discussions around women and body image are not new.  But Vernon is 50 years old.  She has told in articles before of discovering exercise at the age of 40 and marvelling at the ways in which it changed her body.  It is understandable then that she might want to share a picture of herself smouldering in a tiny bikini in a spirit of marvel, a sort of look-what-I-did.  Or you could call it showing off, something that previous generations of parents were all too keen to warn their children against regularly.  Less so nowadays because we are more careful with the concept of self-esteem; we are aware that this is something that our children might just need.  The young girl who does not like her body may be susceptible to eating disorders, the woman who is not comfortable in her skin may not push herself forward in the work place like she should.  Except, when it actually comes down to it, we do not appear to like the reality of women revelling in their bodies.

As a teenager, I did not like my body.  Or rather, I was not comfortable inside it.  It felt like the wrong type of body.  I wanted a supermodel's body.  I did not want my hips or my bottom and ironically, I did not want quite such buoyant breasts.  Of course there is a sad irony that it is at the time when our skin is peachy and our curves pert that we often are least comfortable in our bodies.  Still, I was saved from indulging this particular form of inhibition by having children when I was very young.  Oh the relief, to find that your body only needed to be useful.  And it was.  For over fifteen years it gave birth to and then nourished five children.  My body had purpose.  I could withdraw from any silly notions of liking it.  It did not have to bring me pleasure, only to serve others.  I had risen above vanity!

I remember one summer's day, when the youngest was tiny enough to be in a sling, and we had visited a National Trust property for the afternoon, noticing a group of elderly friends seated at the cafe table next to ours.  I watched their careful and considered movements, the slowness of their actions and the effort that it took to get out of a chair.  And all of a sudden, I wanted to climb a mountain for no other reason than that I could.  It seemed like a vision sent to remind me of the brevity of what we take for granted.  Our wonderful, fit, healthy bodies can do so much but not forever.  And to be blunt, we are dying all the time.  From then on, knowing that I would not have more children, my relationship with my body began to change.  Unlike Vernon, I was no stranger to exercise but from then on it took on a greater intensity; I enjoyed pushing myself beyond self-imposed limits and gradually I began to see that so much of what our bodies can give us comes from our own positive regard.  Because, if not now, when?

If not now, when?  I think this is the mantra that starts to reverberate in women's minds around the age of 40.  If not now, when?  If you have spent your whole life caring for others or doing the things that you were told were right, without much consideration for your own needs, you will wake up at 40 with change on the horizon and you will ask yourself, if not now, when?

I will never have a supermodel's body.  I will only ever have this body.  And this body is not going to look better in two, four, eight years time.  So I have a simple choice: To like it or not.  It is a choice.  If I choose to like it then I can enjoy it.  If I choose to dislike it then I will live only half a life.  So I can, it seems, look at the excess skin on my belly, my softly sagging, dimpled arse and even the pocket of fat on the inside of my thighs that will never disappear even if I become emaciated, and I can look on it all and like it.  Because life is better that way.  So if you look on my bikini selfies with, what? Disgust, embarrassment, whatever, you can fuck right off.  My children would say you're lucky I'm wearing a bikini.  I would say, if not now, when?