Comedy and tragedy

The Centaur’s tweaking of Shakespeare is
half-baked but fun, Robert Lepage keeps the
story going for nine hours

MISTAKEN IDENTITY HAS ITS UPS: The Comedy of Errors

by NEIL BOYCE

The Comedy of Errors was one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays (some think it’s his first), a frantic affair comprising slapstick humour, screaming and good old fashioned servant-beating.

Peter Hinton’s the current artistic director of English theatre at the National Arts Centre and directs frequently in Montreal (often at the Segal Centre). In tackling the most performed author on the planet for this new Centaur production, Hinton gave in to the urge, as many do, to tinker.

The whole thing’s a muddle involving two rival ancient cities, Ephesus and Syracuse, two sets of identical twins (a pair of masters and servants), a man about to be executed for violating a travel ban, and all the confusion, crazy mix-ups and mistaken identities that follow.

Hinton decided to make it fun, updating it to our own twin cities, Montreal and Toronto. Clichés about the two towns, stuffy and polite versus carefree and libidinous, are mined for their limited ore along with an amusingly modern airport and lounge setting. Actors stroll in listening to iPods, wheel around stage on a Bixi bike or knock one back in a bar, often pausing to dose themselves with hand sanitizer.

It’s a production crammed with familiar Montreal actors like Andreas Apergis, Clare Coulter, Marcel Jeannin, Leni Parker and Danette Mackay, and has the feeling of a group of friends, which they all are, having a good time on stage. Certain pairings, like Parker and Jeannin, worked particularly well, while others stick out a mite (the great Quebec actor-director Albert Millaire may have thought he was in a “serious” production). It zipped by without intermission, a seemingly random succession of directorial ideas that rolled along obliviously to the all-is-revealed ending.

Eo Sharp’s great set deserves mention: imposing stainless steel walls with hidden panels throughout revealed a bed, statue or actor with a flourish.

So what if it was half-baked? Everyone seemed to be having fun on stage or, at least, a reasonably convincing facsimile thereof.

Exploration explosion

Robert Lepage’s work, on the other hand, is all about clarity, conviction, concept and following through with the most careful execution of ideas on stage.

It’s only possible to give a very general sense of what went down at Théâtre Denise-Pelletier on the opening night of Lipsynch: a nine-act, nine-hour event that showed once again the possibilities inherent in a great work of theatre.

The opening scene is a cutaway view of an airplane cabin and row of passengers already in flight. At the back, a motionless woman cradles a crying baby. The attendant attempts to wake the woman, whose head lolls forward. She’s dead. The baby is gently removed from her arms and placed in the hands of a concerned fellow traveller.

From this initial explosion, 100 fragmented stories radiate as we explore the origins of the tragedy from the many viewpoints. Sexual slavery, adoption, schizophrenia and the possibility of finding the road back to sanity and equilibrium are examined and filtered through a central theme: the human voice.

Lepage is at the point in his career where he has gathered about him the most talented and innovative artists and designers in the world of performance, but it’s his uncanny sense of how to tell a story that brings it together.

THE COMEDY OF ERRORS, TO MARCH
28 AT CENTAUR THEATRE (453
ST-FRANCOIS-XAVIER) INFO:
(514) 288-3161
LIPSYNCH, TO MARCH 14 AT THÉÂTRE
DENISE-PELLETIER (4353 STE-CATHERINE
E.). INFO: (514) 253-8974