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Lear's daughters . . . or Macbeth's witches . . . or three blokes in baseball boots? William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (abridged)
Birmingham Rep
**** WHO would have
thought that Shakespeare was the inspiration for every Disney film
including Frozen
(A Winter’s Tale)
or that his first play contained all 1, 223 characters and 37 or so
plots from the subsequent plays we remember him by. And who would have thought that this long-lost
tome would have been found in a hole next to a pile of old bones in a
Leicester car park. By now you should be getting a feel for this
latest offering (abridged) from the Reduced Shakespeare Company, a play
which is a mish mash of everything Shakespeare ever wrote in which, for
example, Lear’s daughters are three witches named after sexually
transmitted diseases. We meet them as they discuss the time of their
next meeting . . . as in when shall we three? Oh, do keep up at the
back. Then there is the constant battle between
mischievous sprites Puck and Arial, and the love affairs between Richard
III and Much Ado’s Beatrice, and his dalliance with Falstaff amid his
ukulele playing and stand up – not the easiest position for him, sadly. As usual with the RSC – this lot not the posh lot
– the result is mayhem, and when Shakespeare is concerned, irreverent
and at the same time affectionate - 400-odd years on, we still know many
of his characters intimately and our speech would be all the poorer
without his words and phrases. He's a sort of mate, and you always take
the Mick out of mates. Th RSC have never hit the heights of their
original complete works of the bard – abridged of course – in subsequent
productions, and moving the formulae away from Shakespeare has not
always been successful – the history of comedy was very much a curate’
egg of a show Parody, or in this case, lunacy, demands a main
source with which people are at least familiar and, ideally, for which
they have some fondness and Shakespeare ticks all the boxes with the
bonus of a huge range of characters and plots to go at. Thus Joseph Maudsley, Matthew Pearson and James
Percy, a Birmingham School of Acting graduate incidentally, appear from
behind their backcloth as anything from Cleopatra to Juliet to Bottom to
Ariel - to Richard III, Falstaff, Dromio and Dromio, Henry V, Lady
Macbeth and so on . . . you get the idea. It’s madcap, fast paced and at times very funny
and back to what the RSC (both of them this time) do best, the works of
William Shakespeare, in this case abridged from the original recently
discovered 100 hour long play with it’s cast of 1,200 or so, to 90
minutes with a cast of three. Its subtle enough for (not very demanding)
Shakespeare scholars yet daft enough with enough slapstick and laugh out
loud moments to amuse those who know nothing of Shakespeare beyond it
being an unusual name for a pub. Their best since the original. To
15-02-17 Roger Clarke 14-02-17 |
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