As we leave the playing area and settle onto the comfy couches in the actors’ lounge, Bellis talks about his steampunk interpretation, which he first explored in a student production at Studio 58 in 2011.

“I stumbled on this idea of steampunk because, when I work Shakespeare with students, I try to find some kind of hook that appeals to their contemporary sensibilities and that will allow them to enter into a classical work,” he begins. “And I was thinking about the play as a machine and what it would be like if the characters were all fixing a big machine all the time.”…

Bellis says that the steampunk style, which combines Victoriana and technology in a kind of retro-futurism, suits the script because both are fantastical: “Ephesus is a place of the classical world that we don’t know much about,” he explains, “so it becomes a place of pure imagination.” There are also elements in the plot that speak to steampunk’s roots in the Victorian age and its fascination with the sinister and supernatural. “There are dark overtones to the story,” Bellis says. “There’s possession, there’s madness, there’s violence. The servants get beaten up a lot and we’re asked to accept that as part of this comic story. Working through that dramatically is a challenge we’re taking on.

The above is part of (relevant to this blog) the Georgia Straight's Theatre Critic Colin Thomas’s preview for Bard On the Beach’s production of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors (June 4 to Sept 26). For the preview, a cozy and personal one, Thomas interviewed the director (and actor) Scott Bellis.

William Gibson - Alex Waterhouse-Hayward

There’s been much ado in our retreating media about the fact that this Comedy of Errors is set with the look of the steampunk genre.

I must admit that if I were to opine on this steampunk thing I would have a shallow view based on my somewhat plain ignorance on the subject. In my recent past I have photographed a few women wearing latex suits or dresses with deep décolletage and garish makeup and they said to me, “It’s pure steampunk.”

But to the contrary I have been immersed in steampunk since 1990 when I read William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine. 

This novel is set in Victorian times in which steam-driven analytical engines invented by Charles Babbage rule the world with more than just Britain's mighty navy. The engines contain programming punch cards, conceived by Lord Byron’s daughter Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (known as Ada Lovelace).

Because the computer age has arrived a century ahead of time history is changed, Lord Wellington is assassinated and Lord Byron does not die in Greece but becomes Britain’s Prime Minister.

The novel was published in 1990 before the internet and the World Wide Web took hold of us. Because of this the writing of it involved some pseudo cyberpunk methodology. Sterling lived in Austin and Gibson in Vancouver. They compared notes and shared their latest via more than daily Fedex pickups and deliveries.

Gibson wrote a fine dedication to yours truly and only today as I write this have I really noticed that it is steampunk. I am called a Daguerrotypist!

Through the years I have photographed Gibson many times and in almost all of the sessions the results have had a steampunk look (mostly by suggestion of the author). In fact the 1993 portrait that I took of Gibson in the studio of glass artist Robert Studer, involved a contraption from a series of so-called “Ancient Instruments – Origin Unknown”. The device built for me by Studer sits in my dining room and people ask me what it is. My answers vary. One of them is, Ït's a blue hosta spotter." The ray-gun that Gibson is holding was a gift from Blondie’s Deborah Harry.

Only last year I took my youngest granddaughter Lauren, 12, to the building that replaced the Georgia Medical Building to show her the large interactive sculpture in the lobby. Lauren instantly made the connection with the Robert Studer device in my dining room. I wasn’t savvy enough to tell her it was pure steampunk.

For anybody who might want to research steampunk before the advent of latex ware with deep cleavage in industrial backgrounds you would first look at Jules Verne’s 1879 Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. And if lucky you might want to explore the version that I have The Annotated Jules Verne – Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea – The Only Completely Restored and Annotated Edition by Walter James Miller (1976). My volume contains facsimiles of the engravings of the original edition. I will not have to ask you, “Are they steampunk?”

Captain Nemo at the helm - engraving 1870

I found the explanation by Captain Nemo of the Nautilus’s power unlimited electrical system most interesting:

  

“You know that sea water is composed of. In a thousand grammes are 96½ per cent of water, and about 2 and two thirds per cent of chloride of sodium; then in smaller quantity, cholorides of magnesium and of potassium, bromide of magnesium, sulphate of magnesia, sulphate and carbonate of lime. You see, then, that chloride of sodium form a large part of it. So this is the sodium that i extract from sea-water, and of which I compose my ingredients.”

“Sodium?”

“Yes Professor. Mixed with mercury, sodium forms an amalgam which can take the place of zinc in Bunsen batteries. The mercury is never consumed, only the sodium is used up, and that is supplied by sea-water. Moreover sodium batteries are the most powerful, since their motive power is twice that of zinc batteries.”

The 1954 Walt Disney Technicolor film interpretation of the Verne novel (director Richard Fleischer) with Kirk Douglas, James Mason Peter Lorre and Paul Lukas, unknowingly but lovingly interpreted the Nautilus as pure steampunk. We know that the term steampunk was first coined in 1987 by K. W. Jeter, the author of the novel Morlock Night.

Knowing what I now know about steampunk I can steer interested readers to my other favourite steampunk novel, 1938, (although technically since it is set in Ancient Roman times and not in Victorian times…) L. Sprague De Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall.


An American history professor Martin Padway on a pleasure trip to Rome is hit by lightning and transported to Rome before its fall. The only gadget in his possession is his wrist watch which he soon loses. He soon becomes the virtual ruler of the known world (and Rome does not fall) with two innovations:

1. Double Entry Bookeeping

2. Knowledge of the distillation process that can convert wine into brandy.

On Saturday June 13 my Rosemary and I will be going to a performance of The Comedy of Errors. As always, the night before I will read Harold Bloom’s take (Shakespeare – the Invention of the Human. But I will have no explanation to this wonderful obfuscation (Gibson’s or Sterling’s? ) contained in a speech Lady Ada Lovelace makes in France:

“Our lives would be greatly clarified if human discourse could be interpreted as the exfoliation of a deeper formal system. One would no longer need ponder the grave ambiguities of human speech, but could judge the validity of any sentence by reference to a fixed and finitely describable set of rules and axioms. It was the dream of Leibniz of find such a system, the Characteristica Universalis…

“And yet the execution of the so-called Modus Programme demonstrated that any formal system must be both incomplete and unable to establish its own consistency. There is no finite mathematical way to express the property of ‘truth’. The transfinite nature of the Byron Conjectures were the ruination of the Grand Napoleon; the Modus Programme initiated a series of nested loops, which though difficult to establish, were yet more difficult to extinguish. The programme ran, yet rendered its Engine useless! It was indeed a painful lesson in the halting abilities of even our finest ordinateur.

“Yet I do believe, and must assert most strongly , that the Modus technique of self-referentiality  will someday form the bedrock of a genuinely  transcendant meta-system of calculatory mathematics. The Modus has proven my Conjectures, but their practical exfoliation awaits an engine of vast capacity, one capable of iterations of untold sophistication and complexity.”

The Nautilus engine room, engraving from the original edition 1870