The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)

You would have to have been living under a rock to not have heard of The Reduced Shakespeare Company, the three man American comedy troupe whose hilarious attempt to perform the entirety of Shakespeare’s works in ninety minutes exploded at the Edinburgh Fringe, running for nine years in London in the 1990s and leading them to apply their winning formula to everything from history to cinema and television. Stephanie Bartletts’s decision to stage the company’s first show, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) is thus nothing if not a brave one.

I often think that pure comedy is one of the hardest things to do as it relies entirely on the audience’s reactions; if they don’t laugh within the first few minutes then the next hour and a half are almost guaranteed to be painful. Choosing such a famous show which I’m sure everyone has heard of and no small number of people will have actually seen performed by the company that originated it is therefore an act of lunacy, right? Well, they do say that the distance between madness and genius is measured only by success and judging by the audience’s guffawing reaction on Friday night, Bartlett and her cast are a team of geniuses.

It would be easy to give too much credit to the script (after all, it is very funny, packed full of hilarious set-pieces and one-liners) however the thought of it being delivered by less talented or energetic actors is painful. More so than many other plays, the success or failure of The Complete Works rests heavily on the shoulders of its three-man troupe who are required to fling themselves around the stage for an hour and a half, learn a large amount of choreography (from flamboyant high-fives to a rhyming American football sequence), have perfect comic timing and just generally be very funny. Luckily, Bartlett’s troupe of Louis Lunts, Max Tyler and Freddy Elletson manage to master all of the above and more, throwing themselves into their no-doubt exhausting parts with gusto. The cast, who each play fictionalised versions of themselves, work so well together that it would be redundant and very difficult to try to point to a stand-out performance: Lunts, making his drama barn debut, proves himself to be a very talented comic actor and will no doubt become a regular fixture in the barn in terms to come; Elletson, playing against type, is a whiny, earnest and rather ignorant chap and his various misfortunes (he always seems to end cast as each play’s female lead, wearing a dress and a series of increasingly bizarre wigs) and inability to grasp either Shakespeare’s plays or biography provide some of the play’s biggest laughs; and Tyler, as the troupe’s smug yet stupid Shakespeare scholar, demonstrates a mastery of the ridiculous comedy accent (his Italian American Titus is a particular favourite) and a keen ability to ad-lib and improvise.

Praise must also be heaped on Bartlett’s slick direction and incredible attention to detail which manages to create an atmosphere of shambolic mayhem while never letting the audience genuinely think that the play’s talented cast don’t know exactly what there are doing. Similarly, Bartlett and her producer Sash Sullivan should be praised for their amusingly half painted set which creates the impression of a rather naff attempt to recreate Shakespeare’s Globe in the Drama Barn (the perfect setting for such a deliberately shambolic play) as well as their dizzying array of comedy props which ranges from severed heads to a yapping robotic dog. Katie Lambert who techs the show should also be given credit for her ability to cope with the play’s vast number of tech cues (many of which require impressive comic timing) and her amusing delivery of the few lines she has to shout down from the box as Bob, the company’s techie.

If pushed to criticise the production I would point to the comparatively slow opening which takes a bit too much time introducing the three characters in turn before allowing them to start performing Shakespeare’s works. However, this a very minor point as after this the pace does not let up and the play hurtles towards a hilarious conclusion (which features, rather appropriately, the world’s shortest performance of Hamlet) and it is definitely a testament to the cast’s chemistry with each other that the slowest moment of the play is one of the few in which they are not all on stage together.

Ultimately, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) is an unmissable, virtually faultless and undeniably hilarious celebration of the works of the world’s most famous playwright. It is the perfect cure for any mid-winter term blues and frankly, you’d be mad to miss it.

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