>>REVIEW
THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SHAKESPEARE (ABRIDGED)
Lunchbox Theatre
Runs until March 4
Bow Valley Square
The considerable life of The Reduced Shakespeare Company’s The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Abridged) says a lot about the very idea of a theatrical canon. On one hand, the canon carries a cultural weight so great that the works it contains have lasted for centuries. On the other, these works are more than 400 years old and often so laden with obscurity that high school students across the western world end up scratching their heads at Elizabethan verse that resembles modern English insofar as Shakespeare’s wig-wearing actors actually resembled women.
It’s laughable, thank goodness.
Lunchbox Theatre’s latest version of the popular spoof-survey is the most recent in a series of Calgary productions, including previous ones by Lunchbox and by Mount Royal College’s Shakespeare in the Park. Performed by an all-female cast – in contrast to the original Reduced Shakespeare Company of Adam Long, Daniel Singer and Jess Winfield – this production, while distilled to fit Lunchbox’s 50-minute lunchtime window, is still as energetic as the 97-minute original.
Under the direction of Trevor Rueger, the cast – Andrea Cheung, Lynley Engh and Shari Wattling – pass The Complete Works’ farcical mania from one to the other with all the deftness of a choreographed sword fight, ducking in and out of the scene via the two-dimensional background of Douglas McCullough’s Globe Theatre backdrop. From a fusion of all Shakespeare’s comedies into a single, marooned twin-switching comedy of errors on an island, to an increasingly compressed version of Hamlet, both cast and script keep the frenzied pitch that the play demands.
Cheung pantomimes violent vomiting over audience members in response to Shakespeare’s sexist archetypes, Engh’s airheaded mistakes fuel pun-filled rejoinders, and Wattling’s scene-stealing bravado sees her running from shifting spotlight to shifting spotlight, trying to deliver Hamlet’s immortal soliloquy. Even the play on Shakespeare’s female impersonations still holds water, as Cheung dons a series of wigs, switching from a flighty, surfer girl Juliet to the arm-flailing madness of Hamlet’s Ophelia.
If the production suffers at all, it is simply because, like the canon it parodies, its own age occasionally catches up to it. The Complete Works was London's longest-running comedy with 10 years at the Criterion Theatre and, while Lunchbox’s production mingles some new material with the extant play (including its own fair share of jokes about girl-girl kissing), a line about The Artist Formerly Known as Prince is about five years too late.
But while the odd joke reveals the play’s advancing age, its continued life speaks to its myriad successes. Shakespeare’s canon is still going strong, after all, and the idea of men dressing as women still makes contemporary audiences giggle. Laughing at the Bard has always been excellent canon fodder. |
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