Alchemical love: Griffin, STCSA & Sydney Festival’s Masquerade

If you’ve read the little print at the back of a program for a Griffin Theatre Company production over the past five years, you might have noticed a play called Masquerade as being in development. In 2015, co-produced Griffin and the State Theatre Company of South Australia as part of the Sydney Festival, Kate Mulvany’s Masquerade completes its journey to the stage in a production bursting with life, colour, music and dance. But for all its joyous raucous rambunctiousness, there is a bittersweet and touching story which makes this story, this production, more raw and affecting than it might otherwise have been as a relatively ‘straight’ adaptation.

Bell Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors

From his earliest plays, Shakespeare was transfixed by the ocean and its capacity as a catalyst for change and or rebirth. Plays such as The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Pericles and The Tempest are all infused with the rhythms and responses to such a vast unfathomable body of water such as the Mediterranean, and The Comedy of Errors is no different. One of Shakespeare’s earlier comedies, The Comedy of Errors was written in 1594, and draws its inspiration from two of Plautus’ plays, Menaechmi and Amphitruo. However, Shakespeare – being Shakespeare – sees the inherent theatricality in Menaechmi’s separated identical twins, and doubles it, thus creating a scintillating whirlwind of farce, comedy, identity, tragedy and pathos and his now trademark humanity and warmth.

In Bell Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, however, the farce is perhaps overplayed, the action too breakneck, the whirlwind too impossibly fast that we lose sight of the people at the centre of Shakespeare’s play. A comedy in name and style, The Comedy of Errors – like every other of Shakespeare’s comedies – walks the knife-edge between comedy and warmth, and tragedy and sadness, and I couldn’t help but think there was something missing from Imara Savage’s national tour production for 2013.