Reduced Shakespeare Company till 17 March
ALL THE GREAT BOOKS (ABRIDGED)
Reduced Shakespeare Company
Written by Reed Martin and Austin Tichenor, additional material Matthew Croke and Michael Faulkner
Runs 1h 50m till 17 March 2004
Review: Rod Dungate, 26 February, Birmingham Hippodrome
Fast, furious, funnyThe Reduced Shakespeare Company has been servicing us all for several years now, and for this we owe them much thanks. They have saved us from having to plough through thousands of pages of small print and no pictures. They have enabled us to appear knowledgeable about great drama and literature, as long as we do our bit and listen to them with close attention.
In this show they summarise for us (in great dramatic style) All The Great Books. We are a class of US students; we have failed our SATS (or something like that) and are to be brought up to speed by Coach, Professor and the equivalent of a student teacher.
Replete with outrageous uniforms, cloaks, swords, wigs, skirts and more wigs, plus occasional buckets of water a trio of actors whizzes through ninety books from Christmas Carol to the Iliad to the Invisible Man (who appears courtesy of the word invincible it's the way they tell them.)
Much to be admired is the opener for the second half - a series of interweaving inner monologues from Joyce's Ulysses and a delicious sequence in the first half wandering around the issue of politically correct language. They manage to squeeze in a generous dollop of War and Peace too.
As the guys point out for us 'Reading and fun have little to do with literature.' This is all great fun anyway; fast, furious and funny often very funny. The Reduced Shakespeare Company has developed a new genre really and it makes a change from our fascination with lavatorial humour viz librarial humour.
(Slight puzzle . . . four performers credited but three in the show. Perhaps one was late for class. Here they are.)
Tim Beckmann
Matt Blair
Brian Flaherty
Graham Vick
Director: Reed Martin
Design: Andrew Edwards
Original Lighting: Paul Lamont
2004-02-28 16:17:33