Riffs on Shakespeare: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)
Young People’s Theatre
The National Post

Presented as a lunchtime production, or in some alternative theatre's studio space, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) would be just another stupidly unfunny revue. Presented, as it is now, by the most prominent and highly subsidized youth theatre we have, it's a scandal. Not because it's a bad show: That could happen to anybody. But because its premise, never mind its execution, strikes at the root of what the YPT is supposed to be about.

Basically the show's creators -- three writers, three actors, one director -- say Shakespeare is boring. They say this tongue-in- cheek, on the apparent assumption that if you say it often enough, you will somehow prove the reverse.

It doesn't work like that, though. Individually, they may all love Shakespeare but their collective creation -- or 95% of it anyway -- says, or shrieks, otherwise. Nobody of course is under any obligation to love Shakespeare, and there are plenty of reasons for finding the plays difficult. (All those funny words. And, according to this show, all those funny wigs.) If you as a practitioner find that the difficulties add up to tedium, then probably the best course is to give up and produce something else; there's plenty to choose from. If, on the other hand, you want to help your audience overcome their fears and enjoy the plays, you might do better by putting on a lucid and lively production of one of them than by indulging in two hours of nervous giggle. Which is what we have here: no comic focus, just a sequence of lurching from one weak idea to another.

The title actually suggests a folly of rather more grandeur than what is on offer. I expected to see the stage equivalent of a full- length cartoon that would somehow race through the basic plot-lines of all 37 plays in the canon, perhaps finding ingenious verbal links to take us from one text to another, perhaps even playing some of them simultaneously. It might not have meant much to anybody who didn't know all the plays already, but that was obviously going to be a built-in hazard anyway. (As it still is.)

It turns out, though, that the show proceeds on the assumption that a title mentioned means a play accounted for. The histories -- all of them -- are taken care of in a frenzied football commentary in which the brutal players are all kings: a full complement including Lear (whose play isn't a history) and Henry IV (Parts One and Two). But it would make just as much or as little sense with any other names.

The comedies, introduced to us as plagiarized works with identical plots, are similarly reduced to an all-purpose multiple scenario. Now, if they'd managed to act this out, rather than to deliver it as a gabbled synopsis that we're supposed to applaud for its sheer speed, it might have been clever; but that would require a gift for creative pastiche that none of these authors seems to possess. To be fair, few people ever have; after 400 years, you'd think that the anthologies would be crammed with successful Shakespearean parodies; in fact, there are hardly any. The style seems to be too protean for anyone to get a bead on. This show's approach -- alternating "thou" and "wouldst" and "prithee" with breezy references to hiding the salami -- does not cut it.

Sometimes the proceedings get quite academic; this is, after all, the Young Peoples Theatre, complete with study guide. The actors mention a 38th play, The Two Noble Kinsmen (one of them refers to it as "Chernobyl Kinsmen Shakespeare's contribution to geopolitics"); they say, correctly, that it is generally regarded as part of the Shakespeare Apocrypha; they then define that category for us as "plays that are crap, basically" and give Troilus and Cressida as an example of an apocryphal play that is actually quite good. Well, I don't know exactly how lofty an educational standard the YPT should be setting itself, but I'm fairly sure that it shouldn't be in the business of spreading misinformation, especially misinformation about plays.

The Shakespeare Apocrypha is a technical, not a critical, term referring to plays of doubtful authorship. Kinsmen has long been considered one of them, though its status seems to be changing; Troilus never has. They then start telling us about Troilus, and are getting along all right until one of them mentions "Agamemnon, the Greek general, laying siege to Troy" and is greeted by cries of "boring." It's not quite clear what's so frightening here -- Agamemnon's long name or Troy's short one -- but whatever it is, it stops the show in its tracks and starts it apologizing.

I'm all in favour of teachers, in class or onstage, explaining things; I don't think they should be prostrating themselves before their audiences' ignorance. I don't think the audience are much impressed by it, either. They know when they're being patronized.

If, for example, they've seen Baz Luhrmann's film of Romeo and Juliet, which is a genuine example of making Shakespeare accessible, they may find this show's nudge-wink reduction of the play rather puzzling, since it parodies a performance style that only exists in other parodies. (As for the plot, Shakespeare himself satirized it much better in A Midsummer Night's Dream.)

The same goes for Glenn Davidson's quite ingenious scenic approximation of an Elizabethan stage, and for Sue Le Page's purposefully tacky Elizabethan costumes; they don't relate to how Shakespeare is done today, but only to how lazy comedians would like to think he's done.

Other plays that get comparatively full treatment are Othello, done as rap because of its black hero (I rather enjoyed this), and Macbeth, presented with startling satiric originality in Scots accents (this is where they really should have cried "boring"). And there is Titus Andronicus, whose hero appears in a TV chef's uniform to give us his patented recipe for cannibal pie; the joke, such as it is, must be lost on most of the audience since Titus is not, or ever likely to be, a set text.

And then there is Hamlet, which takes up the entire second half, as it would. It's given a skeletal run-through; mercifully, apart from the apparently obligatory audience-participation sequence in which some poor lady is hauled up to play Ophelia, it uses only lines from the actual text. This is an old idea -- schools do it -- but it gives the actors well-taken opportunities to display their nimbleness, especially when they have to do it again, faster, and then yet again, backwards. (They are Kirk Dunn, Joel Harris and Stephen Guy-McGrath and, insofar as I could distinguish them from what they were required to do, I thought they were all right.)

In the middle of this is the delivery by one of them -- not the one playing Hamlet -- of the "what a piece of work is a man" speech, all of it, spoken sensitively and unfussily. It stilled the house, and even got a round of applause. This, I'm sure, was the intended effect: an assurance that they do believe in the plays after all. But it does not, whatever they may think, atone for the rest of the show. It merely makes it look even sicker.

The program (like too many, and not just at the YPT) tells us less about the authors than it does about the lighting designer, but it lets on that they're called Adam Long, Daniel Singer and Jess Winfield; while the study guide, which seems to have exalted ideas about the show's educational potential, tells us it originated in the U.K. and has been kicking around for years. That is perhaps the most dispiriting thing about the whole enterprise: that the YPT brought this rubbish in, having presumably seen it in advance. (The director, Joel Greenberg, staged it in Toronto two years ago.) It will, I think, leave kids' appreciation of Shakespeare exactly where it found it.

That is, it won't do any harm. But it's taking up space that might have been used to do good. Not sociological good, though that's what the YPT still seems to think its job is, but theatrical good, which is the only reason it has for existing.