This piece by director/writer Ryan J-W Smith garnered fantastic reviews and awards at last years Festival. Its back again this time with an all female cast and Im happy to report its still excellent.
To describe it as a brand new Shakespeare play is to sell it short. True, Smith has done an astonishing job simply writing a play completely in rhyming iambic pentameter and making it lucid and entertaining. But its the fact that he makes it feel so contemporary which is the real coup. This is achieved partly by some of the language, with wonderful lines like methinks this ugly duckling wont upgrade or Ill tear thee limb from limb you little shit, but also because its themes seem so fresh and up to the minute.
The plot is convoluted (deliberately) and is stock Shakespearean fare about star-crossed lovers and deceitful partners, and is driven by a series of soliloquies. For me it really takes off when the device of a play with in a play is introduced (think Hamlet, Midsummer Nights Dream) and the pace really picks up. This is no silly romp, however, with serious points to make about the nature of love and deception. All of the actresses are superb, with particularly strong performances form Elizabeth Arends as Valentine and Clare Harlow as Julia. For me, however, Im not sure having an all female cast completely worked. Smith is on record as saying he cast only women because they were the best actors he saw. The problem is there is so much suspending of disbelief going on in the play the gender thing got in the way for me. Also, though this may just be me, I get uncomfortable when a woman plays a man groping or trying to seduce (or in one case take someone from behind) another woman. There were noticeably less laughs from the audience at these kinds of moments. Also, one of the things the play is about is mens abominable treatment of women down the centuries, and having no real men on the stage to learn that lesson slightly weakens the dynamic.
Its not only about mens treatment of women. There is one astonishing soliloquy half way through which, without totally stepping out of the world of the play, manages to condemn utterly George Bushs hideous foreign policy and implicate the audience in the atrocities that are occurring all over the world. We are guilty because though we may tut tut about it all, we do nothing, and are become a hemisphere of racists. This gear change in the piece and the resulting momentary discomfort in the auditorium are brilliantly pulled off by writer and actress alike, and worth the ticket price alone.
Will Shakespeare, who must be dizzy with spinning in his grave every year when the Festival comes along would thoroughly approve of this companys skill and vaulting ambition.
