Shakespeare Bingo: Titus!

Shakespeare, you say? With bingo? Such subversion excites me. I am given a free glass of wine as soon as I arrive. Things are looking good, I think to myself. This is a company that knows how to please a reviewer. I take my seat and drink my wine. Then the play starts, and things go downhill fast.Actually, my high hopes were lowered slightly before, when I peeked at my neighbours’ bingo cards. Their wacky alternatives to numbers (a sulky goth, Woody from Toy story, Alex’s ‘random’ dance...) were the same as mine. Can bingo work when all the cards are the same? No. Can it distract from a play? Yes. Especially on a thrust stage, where almost all of the audience could see each other and, unfortunately, see whenever anyone ticked any boxes. What could have been fun audience participation ended up making a bad play worse.The play-within-a-play being attempted, complete with frustrated director running out to complain at the crass modernisations, didn’t work. This was largely, but not solely, because I barely heard a word of the rushed snippets of Titus Andronicus. The actors threw their lines away with such consistency that I was unsure whether it was bad on purpose. If so it was a poor directorial decision, as the acting wasn’t significantly improved during the ‘banterous’ new dialogue that surrounded it.There were some nice touches, however. Every death involved a crew in hazmat suits holding up sheets of plastic to catch the blood shot from a super-soaker. It didn’t always look like blood, but when the red light caught it just right, the effect was nice and entertaining. Some of the jokes were fairly funny: specifically, those which didn’t rely on saying ‘HAHA RACIST SHAKESPEARE!’, or ‘HAHA THE TECHIE LIKES AVATAR MORE THAN THIS PLAY’. However, practically all of the praise is owed to Megan, the aforementioned ‘serious’ director – the only performer able to combine frantic delivery with perfect clarity. Her acting was also a breath of fresh air, in a play where the majority of the cast didn’t seem to be trying.It did seem to entertain some of the audience, and first-night nerves may be responsible for some of its flaws, but the overall experience was far from enjoyable. Making the fiction of a bad play successful depends heavily on polished acting, which simply wasn’t there. There is potential for another star to be gained through hard work and practice, but it isn’t there yet, and without Megan this would have received one.