The Travails of The Comedy of Errors in Athens

The Comedy of Errors begins with the description of a shipwreck, presenting the significance of the sea and sea travel as forces both separating and reuniting characters and families. By situating his play in the port city of Ephesus, Shakespeare not only changes the setting of his main source (Plautus’s Menaechmi) from the Adriatic to the Aegean, but also opens up a magical “fairyland”, a cosmopolitan city, at the borders between East and West, representing the religious syncretism and the fusion of cultures, worships and rituals of late antiquity. The setting of the play and its palimpsestic nature underlie the Athenian production of 2018–2019 directed by Katerina Evangelatos that unites diverse theatrical traditions, ranging from the magical world of the circus to Kyogen, and from slapstick comedy—replete with allusions to Charlie Chaplin’s The Cure and The Circus—to Meyerhold’s biomechanics. The performance depended on a central double mirror with revolving doors on a rotating base, as well as on the doubling of actors to address the mirroring and transformation of characters and the themes of optical illusion and loss of identity. Focusing on the visual and sound devices of the performance as well as on its mixture of comic genres and idioms, the essay explores its repossession of the composite material and theme of Shakespeare’s play.