An all-male cast performs Shakespeare in Marseille

The Criée Theatre in Marseille is joining in Shakespeare’s 450th birthday party with a comic double-bill.

The Comedy of Errors © Manuel Harlan

To find plays performed in English in France is a rare enough thing.

But two plays, by William Shakespeare, and by a UK-based company is quite an event.
Director Edward Hall leads the UK-based Propeller Company in a merry dance with an amusing and lively, A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream and The Comedy of Errors.

The Comedy of Errors played at the auditorium in the Parc Chanon as work is going on at the Théâtre’s home at the Old Port.

The company successfully adapted the décor of graffittied metal flats and none, at least visibly, missed their cue.

Fourteen men, four of them playing women, work at a cracking pace, using a range of comic stage forms accompanied by music and song (even tuneful) to keep the audience with them.

The Comedy of Errors is a very funny play. The humour springs from the misunderstandings that come about when two sets of twins who are separated at a young age come close (unknowingly of course) to meeting up years later.

Hall takes a few liberties, notably with familiar pop songs and dance, but also with the for example, the character of Pinch the schoolmaster who has become an American rocker preacher. In this staging, it’s told by sombrero sporting football fans in some Latino place, a Mediterranean island for Shakespeare, “somewhere off Argentina” according to Dugald Bruce-Lockhart, assistant artistic director of the play.

Propeller is on tour with the two comedies and if your spirits need a lift, try and catch them. It’s a real pleasure to laugh with Shakespeare, especially when the actors’ art ensures you can understand every word.

La Criée in Marseille, is one of the many theatres in France to pay tribute to the great British playwright William Shakespeare born in 1564.

Ariane Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil is preparing a version of Macbeth, due to start at the end of April. Expectations are high among her fans, however, this one to be performed in French, not to be in English.