Song of Love
Aug. 14th, 2013 11:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
todayiamadaisyLast night I went to see The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), which was exactly what it sounds like. Waiting to go in, I bumped into my colleague Tim, who said, 'I've got no idea what this is going to be like, funny, dramatic, or what,' which I thought was odd. I was expecting a comedy. It has to be, doesn't it? Three actors doing all the plays in two hours are hardly going to have time to draw out the drama.
It was a comedy, of course. It started with the hideous, looming spectre of audience participation. They had us raise our hands if we'd ever seen any Shakespeare play performed, then keep them raised if we'd ever seen this play or that play, until they finally found the one, weirdly pasty, guy in the audience who'd seen King John. They pulled him up on stage and it turned out, surprise!, that he was one of the performers too. Phew, thought the audience.
The first half of the show was good. I mean, comedy codpieces can't go wrong. They got through all but one play, largely by combining most of them into one master text with seven sets of separated twins being shipwrecked on different islands. Titus Andronicus was a cooking show (plenty of cleavers in a kitchen, you see, all the better for hacking off limbs), the history plays were a football match with the crown being passed from king to king (King Lear was sent off for being fictional), the tragedies showed a succession of lead characters dying. Each lead character was readily identifiable: Juliet had a blonde wig with a huge snood, Romeo had iPod earbuds, Macbeth's face was painted blue, Othello wore a necklace of toy boats.
Then there was an interval, with the promise of Hamlet when we returned. Only when we returned, the interval music kept playing. And playing and playing. After about fifteen minutes, the theatre manager left his seat in the audience, and climbed the stairs to the stage to find out what was happening (the City by the Sea: so small the entire audience knows who the theatre manager is). After another five minutes, the theatre manager and one of the actors came out to say that the weirdly pasty one had been taken ill and the show was over. Poor man.
So we didn't see Hamlet, and now I will never know how it ends.
The rest of it was pretty funny, and I recommend it if a touring version passes your house at some point.
It was a comedy, of course. It started with the hideous, looming spectre of audience participation. They had us raise our hands if we'd ever seen any Shakespeare play performed, then keep them raised if we'd ever seen this play or that play, until they finally found the one, weirdly pasty, guy in the audience who'd seen King John. They pulled him up on stage and it turned out, surprise!, that he was one of the performers too. Phew, thought the audience.
The first half of the show was good. I mean, comedy codpieces can't go wrong. They got through all but one play, largely by combining most of them into one master text with seven sets of separated twins being shipwrecked on different islands. Titus Andronicus was a cooking show (plenty of cleavers in a kitchen, you see, all the better for hacking off limbs), the history plays were a football match with the crown being passed from king to king (King Lear was sent off for being fictional), the tragedies showed a succession of lead characters dying. Each lead character was readily identifiable: Juliet had a blonde wig with a huge snood, Romeo had iPod earbuds, Macbeth's face was painted blue, Othello wore a necklace of toy boats.
Then there was an interval, with the promise of Hamlet when we returned. Only when we returned, the interval music kept playing. And playing and playing. After about fifteen minutes, the theatre manager left his seat in the audience, and climbed the stairs to the stage to find out what was happening (the City by the Sea: so small the entire audience knows who the theatre manager is). After another five minutes, the theatre manager and one of the actors came out to say that the weirdly pasty one had been taken ill and the show was over. Poor man.
So we didn't see Hamlet, and now I will never know how it ends.
The rest of it was pretty funny, and I recommend it if a touring version passes your house at some point.