Bell Shakespeare brings queer Comedy of Errors to Canberra Theatre Centre

To paraphrase Harold Bloom and William Hazlitt: you'll either laugh like drains or keep glancing down at your watches from the opening curtain.

Or you might not go at all if you are a traditionalist who froths at the thought of gender-swapping roles.

In this production, two of the main characters are non-binary. On top of that, a heterosexual relationship in Shakespeare's version becomes homosexual in director Janine Watson's take on Shakespeare.

But remember: Shakespeare has always been adapted. He was an impresario and playwright who turned out an average of two plays a year for nearly 20 years. All the evidence is that he didn't see himself as a highfalutin author of sacred texts where not a comma could be changed. He wanted an audience.

And that audience should laugh at the jokes.

The Comedy of Errors is a farce. It's usually a romp about mistaken identities: two identical twin brothers (with the same name), separated at birth, have two servants who are also identical to each other.

They end up again 33 years later in the Greek city of Ephesus (transformed in this production to a 1970s Mediterranean holiday resort with a lot of disco music and non-Shakespearean drugs).

There's a lot of confusion as the two identical brothers mistake each other's identical slaves.

What could go wrong?

What could go wrong is that nobody laughs. The play depends on timing, with swift entrances and exits. Get the timing wrong and the farce flops.

But with this Bell Shakespeare production, Watson has downplayed the slapstick, turning the production into a more serious comedy with (she hopes) more thoughtful laughter. Rather than loud guffaws, she is going for wry smiles and some pathos.

She believes the laughs will come from the gestures and facial movements of the actors, the tears of a clown, as it were.

But the gender politics are there.

It is a "Queer Comedy of Errors", according to Julia Billington who plays Dromio of Syracuse, one of the two identical slaves (the other is Dromio of Ephesus).

The actor feels the production is intelligent: "It has been done from a very smart, potentially political place. Part of that is the gender swapping, and part - for the Dromios specifically - lies in making them non-binary.

"It's not like we've picked up a script and gone, 'oh, this will be fun, let's layer it on top'. It really fits, because so much of the theme and the through line of The Comedy of Errors is about searching for identity. Searching for self. Claiming non-binaryism is about claiming your whole self. That's the feeling of being accurately seen."

Watson accepts that there is no reason in the text for the gender swapping. She said that she wanted to "reflect the world that we are in now". There was no great political statement in choosing non-binary characters: "I just want to reflect a world with queer spaces," she said.

There is some rewriting of the text. In this production, both of the non-binary Dromios are referred to by other characters as "they" and "them" rather than "he" and "him".

So the original line: "... I beat him, And charged him with a thousand marks in gold," becomes "... I beat them, And charged them with a thousand marks in gold".

The director in collaboration with the cast has also changed the gender of one of the characters so that a romance between a man and a woman becomes a gay relationship (Luciana becomes Luciano).

All of this is debatable. And, for what it's worth, my own view is that gender-swapping in plays sometimes makes sense but often doesn't. I've seen a play by a gay playwright (Present Laughter by Noel Coward) where a heterosexual relationship in the original becomes a homosexual one in the recent production. It made sense because Noel Coward might well have wanted it that way because homosexuality was illegal when he wrote the play.

But a lot of gender-swapping seems to me to be little more than trendy wokery. That is my opinion. This production of The Comedy of Errors may or may not be. If the audience laughs and is engaged, all is forgiven. By the way, the reviews at venues before Canberra have been good.

Even if the audience doesn't belly-laugh, sometimes the best humour is wry, with a touch of sadness.

There is a dark side to this comedy. After all, it is about a family broken apart and (spoiler alert) being reunited - eventually.

Or as Skyler Ellis (Antipholus of Ephesus) puts it: "Often Comedy of Errors is interpreted as very farcical, fast-paced, mistaken identity, but the more we explore it, the deeper it is in terms of these characters' longing and want for family

That, the actor feels, resonates "at a time like now, post-COVID".

"There's a lot of grief and longing in the play. There's a lot of romance in the play," Watson says.

"There's a darker side to it. We are exploring the darker undercurrents of characters' intentions."

Two of the usual butts of the humour are the two slaves, Dromio and, er, Dromio. In most productions, the two aristocratic brothers humiliate them, and that is part of the usual "humour".

In other productions, they are beaten and made to look silly, and that is all part of the fun.

But Watson doesn't think it's funny at all. She doesn't like the powerful punching down on the powerless as a source of mirth, so she makes the Dromios answer back. "You won't see them feebly running away," the director said.

Shakespeare lives because he speaks to each generation anew. He is not set in stone. People keep coming back because each new interpretation offers a new chance to think.

Better a production which does that than some tired old version where the wrist-watch wins.

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