Live at the Porpentine: A Comedy of Errors

Abstract

Reviewed by: Live at the Porpentine: A Comedy of Errors Robin Alfriend Kello Live at the Porpentine: A Comedy of Errors Presented by The Independent Shakespeare Company. Streamed via You-Tube, 10–20 March 2022. On demand streaming via Vimeo. Directed by David Melville. Written by David Melville and William Shakespeare. Music by David Melville. Cinematography and editing by William Lancaster. Sound mixed by Christina Jacobson. Costume design by Ann Closs-Farley. Set design by Natalie Morales. With Brent Charles (Antipholus), Tonya Kay (Luce), Carene Rose Mekertichyan (Luciana), David Melville (Dr. Pinch), Xavi Moreno (Dromio), Bukolo Ogunmola (Adriana), Erika Soto (Frau Müller), and Sabra Williams (Emilia). A chanteuse and a goat walk into a bar. The chanteuse is Frau Müller, a mysterious grifter with a golden voice and a taste for diamonds. The goat is Mel, a delightful creature of appetites who gets stolen, swapped, and drawn into a series of wayward plots on a long Ephesian afternoon. The bar, of course, is The Porpentine (est. 1952), the smoky, swanky cabaret at the heart of David Melville’s film adaptation of The Comedy of Errors, which takes Shakespeare into the technicolor, pre-Beatles 1960s and ups the ante on the entwined erotic and commercial strands of his dramatic source. Just as the budding English playwright looked at the dramatic model of Plautus’s Menaechmi and thought, “Hey, you know what this play could use?—more twins!”, Melville works the already over-the-top twists and turns of Errors into a dazzling, Freudian funhouse of sight gags and none-too-subtle sexual innuendos, punctuated by a moody score and the episodic appearances of Müller and Mel, who serve as delightful guides to the dizzying world of Live at the Porpentine. [End Page 468] Click for larger view View full resolution Frau Müller (Erika Soto) in Live at the Porpentine, dir. David Melville. The Independent Shakespeare Company, 2022. Photo courtesy of Better than Dreams. From the get-go, the film drops its audience into an aesthetic straight out of The Pink Panther, with Müller, played with hip-swaying swagger by Erika Soto, providing backstory through song, while cartoon credits dance onscreen: “Four little boys, each the mirror image / Took a family pilgrimage / On a southern sea.” Soto stretches the word “pilgrimage” to make the rhyme with “mirror image,” bringing out Melville’s witty lyricism, and setting a tone that echoes the film’s bright palette of Pantones. Exposition has never been such fun. As anyone familiar with Errors knows, two of those little boys lost at sea were Antipholus of Syracuse and Antipholus of Ephesus, twins who in the play endure a few hours of mix-up and mayhem before a miraculous family reunion. The other set of separated twins, the Dromios, attend the errant Antipholuses as they stumble through Ephesus, beginning to doubt their sanity while entangling themselves in troubles both romantic and financial. The original plot revolves around a thousand variations of the same joke—twins! But the audience does not come, and certainly will not stay, for plot alone, and though the vibrant colors, physical comedy, and jazzy tunes lure the spectator in, the fine performances of the actors sustain Porpentine’s two hours’ traffic of streaming on YouTube. Brent Charles stars as the bewildered Antipholus of Syracuse and as his twin from Ephesus, an errant lush who strays to the Porpentine to escape the comforts of domesticity. Whether taking an ice-cream cone on the head or making out with Tonya Kay’s seductive Luce, Xavi Moreno’s Dromios present a [End Page 469] playful openness to happenstance, as if the only reasonable response to the confusion of Ephesus is to roll with the—occasionally literal—punches. As the sisters Adriana and Luciana, Bukolo Ogunmola and Carene Rose Mekertichyan, with a huff, squeal, or an eyeroll, decimate any lingering desire the audience may have for strict fidelity to the Shakespearean text. As Melville—who also plays Müller’s sidekick in the Porpentine, the lead guitarist and quack physician Dr. Pinch—explained to me, what counted as funny in 1593 may have gone stale by 1594, and some of the Elizabethan punchlines of...