The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) return!
More than 20 years after the end of its West End presence, the Reduced Shakespeare Company is back on the road with The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged).
By Adam Long, Daniel Singer and Jess Winfield, it is being presented on tour by The Theatre Chipping Norton and Selladoor Worldwide with dates including the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford, March 30-April 2 and Mayflower Studios – Studio 1, Southampton from April 15-18.
Adam explains: “The play which was in the West End has been licenced all around the world and it has still existed in productions going on in every corner of the globe but this is the first time that the RSC has revisited it in the UK since we closed at The Criterion in 2005.”
Since then Adam has been working very much in children's TV: “But through my work in children's TV I was working with some really young, amazing, diverse talents and I just thought about all these fantastic people out there. My wife ended up mentioning an Oxford theatre group that were doing the complete works of William Shakespeare abridged and they were performing it in a way that was hysterically funny. I talked to Selladoor and said how do you feel about doing something with some really exciting fresh young people. We started with the same script and the same premise but we ended up spending a little over a month with this particular cast. We set out looking for young comic Shakespeareans and we got 2,400 people sending in CV's. It amazed me that there were people there who weren't even born when we were in the West End or who were maybe two or three years old. We started looking at them and whittled it down to our favourite four.
“I think a significant difference this time is that they're not Californians at all. We used to be three Californians that didn't know better, trying to do the complete works of Shakespeare but now we've got one guy from Bristol and one from Korea and one from East London and one from Oxford and they're just playing themselves. The premise is that they think they are doing something very culturally significant! And actually I think they are doing the most culturally significant thing that has ever been done in the theatre! They're putting on stage something masquerading as low-brow entertainment which is actually very high-brow entertainment, I would say!”
And the essence of it all? “I think people just don't realise how fantastic Shakespeare is. People ask whether we are the antidote to doing Shakespeare in a really boring, dry way but I've never seen a Shakespeare that's been boring and dry. Shakespeare is the best thing ever. You've got supernatural beings and patricide and fratricide. It is far better than anything that you've got on Netflix at the moment. And it's so capable of being interpreted in so many different ways. It can be set on the moon or it can be set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. For people who know and love Shakespeare, seeing us is just a great reminder of how fantastic Shakespeare is. And for people who don't know and love Shakespeare already, it's a great chance to discover just how wonderful Shakespeare is.”