Review of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) – Such brevity is the soul of wit | stage

A A classic actor who appeared in a recent production of Othello told me that the cast was so disturbed by the murders that on many nights he was met with explosions of laughter. This may be because audiences saw the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s 1987 staging of The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Abridged) during its extended West End runs or world tours. Or other examples of the ‘sculpted poet’ trend initiated by RSC founder Adam Long, including Spymonkey’s The Complete Deaths, making an essential incidental aspect of Long’s shortcomings: climactic body build-ups.

In Long’s revival, it is clear, from intermittent conversations, that many who had been taken to the full works as teenagers were now bringing their own with them. The local disc acknowledges this. Louis Theroux, who was in sixth grade when the original premiered, grew to admire this iteration, as he did with other contemporary phenomena, including Ozempic.

However, the central joke continues to reduce five acts to five minutes or less. The apocalyptic climax of Titus Andronicus, presented as a TV cooking show, is about reductio in two ways. Childishness – like the oldest joke in Shakespearean scholarship, which revolves around the last two verses of Coriolanus – competes with academicism. The claim that the same basic plot is shared by the fourteen comedies—presented here as frenetic anthologies—keeps the running time at a brisk hour and 40 minutes, including intermission, but also makes a point about the narrative economy of a busy playwright. This comprehensive approach to performing cartwheels and exercises reflects the tightrope between reduction and circulation.

There is audience participation (at one point including my copy of the theatrical programme) that culminates in an unusual new kind of tragic pantomime, with sections of the audience shouting out various parts of Ophelia’s subconscious in a Freudian yarn in the scene of her breakdown.

Long before, Sir Tom Stoppard did something similar with the fifteen-minute Hamlet (1976), which was cut down to two minutes at the end; Stoppard also created a 30-minute play The Merchant of Venice for schools in 2005. So another great English dramatist is a friendly ghost in this revival, the RSC’s Hamlet ignores Rosencrantz and Guildenstern because “they have their own play,” and eventually tries to reduce the play to seconds, aiming to speed up Stoppard’s stopwatch.

To work, the short requires three fantastically charismatic and flexible artists, and this revival finds them. Vanity demands that Effie Aguile be able to deliver a classically spoken and emotional Hamlet, which she does amid the cursory characterization. Also excelling in these are Woogie Jung, who charms the audience, and professional newbie Tom Pavey (the charming Ophelia), who is tasked with antagonizing us.

There’s a history of upper-class farces that thrived during dark times – Michael Frayn’s Noises Off brought solace during recessions and wars – and in another time when big laughs were sorely needed, these eviscerated classics should provide them for most people.