Week 9: Food for thought
March 20, 2012
30 December 2011
We have just experienced a rarity in any rehearsal period: a week off.
As I worked my way through boxes of mince pies, my mind was still buzzing with the ideas that bring these plays together.
Forced Migration:
'By foul play…were we heaved from thence,
But blessedly holp hither'
(The Tempest. I. ii. 63-64.)
All three plays start with disasters at sea. What does being shipwrecked in a new place do to your sense of who you are, and your understanding of the world? These plays are immigrant narratives written in the 16th and 17th centuries, but couldn't be more relevant to our contemporary reality.
'I to the world am like a drop of water
That in the ocean seeks to find another drop
Who, failing there to find his fellow forth
(Unseen, inquisitive) confounds himself.'
(The Comedy of Errors. I. ii. 35-38.)
Social exclusion:
'…thy vile race
(Thou thou didst learn) had that in't which good natures
Could not abide to be with'
(The Tempest. I. ii. 358-361.)
In these plays, as in life, the characters define themselves not only with an understanding of who they are, but also in opposition to who they are not.
Whether it be Caliban and Ariel in The Tempest, Malvolio and Antonio in Twelfth Night, or the Dromios in The Comedy of Errors, these 'excluded' characters clarify the social boundaries that exist in each play.
'Why have you suffered me to be imprisoned,
Kept in a dark house, visited by the priest,
And made the most notorious geck and gull
That e'er invention played on! Tell me why!'
(Twelfth Night. V. i. 335-338.)
Twins:
'How have you made division of yourself?
An apple cleft in two is not more twin
Than these two creatures.'
(Twelfth Night. V. i. 218-220.)
How better to examine yourself, than by comparing yourself to your twin — someone who looks like you, can pass for you, but is fundamentally different from you? In Twelfth Night we explore this through Viola and Sebastian. In The Comedy of Errors it's the Antipholuses and the Dromios. In The Tempest, there is a twinning of experience between Antonio supplanting Prospero and Sebastian's attempt to take his brother Alonso's kingdom by murdering him.
'Methinks you are my glass, and not my brother,
I see by you I am a sweet-fac'd youth'
(The Comedy of Errors. V. i. 417-418.)
by Ankur Bahl
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