There were a lot of good aspects when seeing Comedy of Errors at the Globe; the acting was great, some of the jokes were spectacular, and the staging was very funny. Yet there were two major elements that detracted from my viewing experience, the scorching hot rays of the sun and the very distracting captioning devices that were resting on the balcony. The seats that we had gotten this time around were much better than they were for our viewing of Midsummer a few weeks back, however the sun was beaming down, directly Into the stands that we were sitting in, and it slowly roasted many of us that were sitting in the first two rows. Personally, I did feel tired from the sun, but I did not get a sunburn so I kinda ‘lucked out’ by sitting in the place that I did. The acting was very good and all of the actors were very funny, but I had trouble not getting distracted by the two large screens of captions. Almost every time that someone was slapped, I realized that I had naturally gone to read the captions, rather than watching the performance, and it felt like I kept missing various reactions or punchlines because of them. There were a lot of other distractions during this show as well, which I know the play is not at fault for, however they did still affect my experience and reaffirmed my belief that babies shouldn’t be taken to see Shakespeare at an outside theatre when it’s hot enough to cook an egg. That does not bode well for the baby. I’d probably be crying too to be entirely honest.
My final opinion of Comedy of Errors as a play is that no matter how funny your actors are or how cool the staging is, a script that repeats the same joke over and over again is not gonna become less repetitive. I would say that, similarly to Dancing at Lughnasa, I enjoyed the production of this piece a lot, but I don’t quite like the script. I think that, as a critic from the time, I would say that Shakespeare has a lot of potential, given that it is one of his earliest works.
Theatre in London U of A 