CAST’s Energetic Performance of “The Comedy of Errors”

“You have to go for a grade,” your professor says to the class. There’s a slight groan from someone and you can practically feel the numerous eye rolls. The play is “The Comedy of Errors” by William Shakespeare and will be put on by students from Cambridge University. Yes, you read that right: Shakespeare. Your professor assures you it will be very funny and entertaining, but you know for a fact it will be downright boring. Not to mention the fact that the actors will also be coming into the classroom to do a workshop on how to read and understand Shakespeare. How fun.

Turns out you were wrong. When the Cambridge University students arrived to the English classroom for the workshop, the room was buzzing with nervous excitement. There is something much different about learning Shakespeare when it comes from someone other than your professor. It seems less of a chore and more of a hobby. The students from Cambridge asked us to interpret the script from their play into our own words, and so we did. When we shared our interpretations, there was agreeable laughter. The actors had asked us to interpret the lines into something we would say in our daily lives, so it was quite entertaining to watch the nonsense of Shakespeare’s writing unfold into more modern terms to include the use of slang. Jamie Sayers, the actor who plays numerous roles in the production, said that when he first started doing the workshops, he was nervous that students would not respond with a positive, all-in attitude, but was pleasantly surprised to see that the students were engaged and really enjoying themselves.

“The Comedy of Errors” is a play of dramatic confusion. A family consisting of a mother and father, identical twin boys, and identical twin servants are separated at sea. One of each twin boy and twin servant sails away with the father, and the other two with the mother in different directions. The father and the two boys end up in Syracuse, while the mother and the two other boys end up in Ephesus. The son in Syracuse decides to venture off to find his long-lost twin brother, and with him, he brings the servant. Around the same time, the father also decides to seek his wife and lost sons. They all arrive in Ephesus only to find that there are a fee and punishment for those who come from Syracuse. The two boys, Antipholus and Dromio, get off easy, but the father must find the money for the fee or face death. Almost immediately, Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse are mistaken for Antipholus and Dromio of Ephesus and they must figure out why and where all the confusion is coming from.

The actors from Cambridge University did a wonderful job portraying this comedic confusion in a high-energy, over-exaggerated performance, filled with silly costumes and dancing. Basically, they showed us the last thing we would expect from a performance of a Shakespeare play. They took what Shakespeare had written and made it their own without taking away the elements of the original script. They made it very entertaining and easy to follow regardless of the endless confusion. You could tell they wanted to be here, and they made you feel the same. They engaged the audience with their captivating, silly performance, but also with their body language, frequently turning to address the audience with questions and statements. The audience was in constant laughter, and at one point, there was even a performance of Beyonce’s “If I Were a Boy.”

So, at the end of the day, I guess we should thank our professors for telling us to go. The Cambridge students turned Shakespeare’s “The Comedy of Errors” into a more modern, student-friendly version and surprised us with twists and turns that added to the overall comedy of this event.