★★★☆☆
Three Stars
Evidently, the three-man cast of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Abridged are exceptionally comfortable and well-rehearsed in their roles. However, this self-assurance and familiarity with the script is at once the play’s strength and its greatest weakness.
Gags were delivered with all the slickness you would expect from a company playing the final night of a three-month tour. However, the show now moves to a four-week residency at the Leicester Square Theatre, and the cast may well find London audiences less forgiving than the merrily shit-faced farmers, rambunctious school-children and affable pensioners who made up the audience for this performance in the grounds of Ludlow Castle in Shropshire.
The knockabout slapstick humour of the script would benefit from a little less fluency and assurance, and a cast more willing to think on their feet. When I saw the riotous One Man, Two Guvnors over Easter, the lead role was taken by an understudy. He therefore approached the performance determined to wring every ounce of physical comedy out of the role, holding nothing back as he bounced around the stage like a madcap jester in a mustard-checked suit. It is this exuberance which was missing here from the performance of road-weary actors arguably stifled by their familiarity with the script.
Personally, though, I have an almost endless capacity to be amused by people falling over — and there were also moments of genuine wit amongst the pratfalls and funny walks. An opening monologue where a haplessly confused academic accidentally conflated Shakespeare’s biography with that of Hitler as he frantically shuffled his cue-cards worked well, as did the combination of all of Shakespeare’s comedies into a single scene full of frantic cliché. (“Enter stage left a heavy-handed metaphor for the colonial experience, pursued by two cross-dressing identical twins and a Jewish stereotype”.)
Utterly predictable pop-cultural references added nothing to this ‘revised’ version of the RSC’s original. Wikipedia is a little unreliable! Young people these days like Facebook! Justin Bieber’s fame is perhaps disproportional to his abilities! The show could have done without these moments of groundbreaking observational humour. Likewise, opportunities for audience interaction passed by as they have done in a thousand amateur pantomimes. A less formulaic and more laidback approach to this over-long section of the show would allow for the evident natural improvisational wit of the performers to shine through.
The much-vaunted idea that anyone can understand Shakespeare if it is well-performed is completely fallacious, and this show must be commended for its attempts to bring his work to audiences which would otherwise run a mile from Titus Andronicus or The Two Noble Kinsmen. A moment where one of the cast realises the true power of the Bard’s work as he delivers the ‘what a piece of work is a man’ speech from Hamlet genuinely reminded me of the beauty and clarity of the playwright’s best work.
In places, the script is very funny, and the actors’ physical humour keeps the audience ticking over well enough through lean patches. There is a sense, though, that they are going through the motions at the end of an arduous tour, and it is a shame their comedic talents are not given more room to breathe. Ultimately, this production is too professional for its own good.
The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Abridged, Revised) will be performed at the Leicester Square Theatre, London from 16th July to 11th August. Tickets can be bought from directly from the theatre, here.
