For a winter vacation of sorts, Dominic Cooke has skipped from his Sloane Square office to the biggest stage on the South Bank. Presumably, he took a roundabout route. His Ephesus has Soho’s neon and hookers, Wapping’s warehouses and dockers and a Harley Street clinic in place of an abbey.
While it may not make you see London in a new light – these are mostly familiar stereotypes of a metropolitan underworld presented for entertainment, rather than education – it certainly reveals Shakespeare’s play in almost all its glory. This is concept Shakespeare at its very tightest and the context Cooke has created leaves no loose end untied.
Into this London-Ephesus, Cooke trafficks Lenny Henry’s Antipholus of Syracuse and his sidekick Dromio (Lucian Msamati). The move means their mistaken identities become enveloped into the unfamiliar and strange-seeming customs. Alternately, flirted with and harangued by apparently familiar strangers, Henry and Msamati jump to the conclusion of witchcraft, hopping back with every greeting, clicking and clucking to ward off evil spirits. It manages the near-impossible feat of making the farce convincing, not contrived.
What’s missing, however, is the giddiness of it. The Olivier is too large for quickfire chaos and Bunny Christie’s design – gorgeous and multi-faceted though it is – further slows the pace. It’s not without goofy humour – far from it, Msamati and his opposite number Daniel Poyser, in particular, are nicely doltish and there’s plenty of slapstick and colour – but it never disarms you as the best farce manages.
Cooke’s skill is to make the laughs feel a bonus, for he has managed the drama exquisitely. From the start, he stresses the urgency of the situation. Joseph Mydell’s Egeon is frogmarched out, bound and on the brink of execution. His thousand mark debt for illegal entry is a dire situation and Cooke proceeds to draw out the financial transactions throughout the play.
No one misses an opportunity to pick a pocket or nick a wallet. Prostitutes demand payment and bribes are slipped in place of bail. You realise that every comic routine between the Antipholuses (Antipholi?) and their mistaken Dromios is formulaic and monetary: each time a large sum is given and the wrong goods are returned. What’s more, because Cooke animates the long (and often tiresome) opening speech, it’s clearer than ever that the Dromios were purchased in infancy. The rich exploit the poor; the overlords prey on and pay off the underworld. This is the London in which financial inequality faces off across a single post code.
Henry gives a strong comic performance, showing off the best poker-face in the business. Towering over Msamati, he just looks down, features still, before erupting and raining snooker cue blows down on his head. His opposite number Jarman lacks his inimitable natural warmth and the violence seems less comic in his hands, without being replaced with threat.
Adriana and Luciana become Stratford wives; women of leisure soaking in skin treatments and tottering in four-inch heels. Inventively played by Claudie Blakley (channelling Tracy-Anne Oberman’s stint on Eastenders) and Michelle Terry, they become a considered essay in feminism; the one brassy and barking orders, the other timidly clinging to her, advocating acquiescence. There’s great comic support from Amit Shah’s weedy Angelo, whose one-note interruptions make moreish comic morsels.
But Cooke’s greatest coup is the ending, in which the two sets of twins are reunited alongside Egeon and his wife, now the Abbess (Pamela Nomvete). Cooke stages it beautifully, emphasising the truest reconciliation with just the right note of sentiment to pop a lump in your throat. Their dignity and love, neither flash nor needing to prove itself, proves the point that the younger generation have missed.
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