The basic premise behind this piece is a clever one. To quote the press release, its an original Shakespearean tragedy created entirely of lines from every one of the playwright's works. Seamlessly sewn together to form an exciting new tale that the Bard himself would be proud of.
To construct a play that the worlds greatest ever wordsmith would be proud of is an impossible boast, and one this young company falls far short of. Why raise the bar so high? In actuality they have put together a very interesting piece, but King Lear it isnt.
It takes as its starting point Jacques great aria about the seven ages of man from As You Like It. There are in fact two mewling, puking infants, brothers Jack and Edmund, sons of the king. The tale that is spun for us is about how they grow up, become rivals for the same girl, and their fathers throne. It all ends in murders, and tears and battles.
Theres some very good acting, especially from Daniel Kelly as Prince Edmund and Ami Sawran as the love interest, Kate. Directors Rebecca Bax and James Percy could do with some sound effects to cover the long blackouts, but keep the action tumbling along nicely. They might get their actors to be less shouty in the emotional passages, though this is preferable to not being heard, which is often the case in this difficult, sound-absorbing, soporific, black hole of theatre. Considering the whole point of the exercise here is for us to understand the words in a new context, these young actors should learn to trust them to use their own power.
Some of this is very clever, particularly when words are picked up on from different plays and resonated. However the piece does rely quite heavily on three plays Taming Of the Shrew, King Lear and Hamlet. One of the problems for me was that sometimes the significance of the line from its original play got in the way of its function in this new one.
There is also a fair bit of miscomprehension of the original. You cant have someone using Gertrudes metaphor when sorrows come they come not single spies but in battalions when we have, in fact, only had one sorrow and therefore only one metaphorical spy. Similarly, weeping there is special providence in the fall of a sparrow over the body of a dead loved one is to totally misunderstand that speech, which is about fatalism, stoicism and readiness for anything life can throw at you the opposite of grief, in fact.
The real acid test of this as a proper play is to get someone to review it that has never heard a word of Shakespeare in his or her life. Cant we get Brian out of the big Brother House?
