Samantha Leese finds out how three actors can squeeze Shakespeare’s 37 plays into a 90-minute laugh fest

Troilus and Cressida with dinosaurs. Titus Andronicus as a cooking segment. Macbeth played in rolling, overwrought Scottish accents. And all of William Shakespeare’s histories condensed into an American football game. This is just some of what the Reduced Shakespeare Company has in store for us this fortnight, when American actors Austin Tichenor, Mick Orfe, and Matt Rippy take to the stage for a 17-show run of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged).

On the phone from Los Angeles and against a backdrop of police sirens, Tichenor sums up the 90-minute rocket-ride through all 37 of the Bard’s plays as, simply, “three people embarrassing themselves”. It’s an unlikely formula for a show that ran for nine years at London’s prominent Criterion theatre, was the only play not pulled from the West End on the day of Princess Diana’s funeral, and – 17 years after its inception – received a Laurence Olivier Award nomination for best new comedy, but the longer we talk, the more it seems an accurate summary. The dinosaurs, for example, are part of an interpretive dance performance of Shakespeare’s Trojan tragedy.  

“The point with all of our shows is to get to the essence of the thing,” explains Tichenor, the one-time University of California, Berkeley history major who co-wrote five of the company’s six running plays, “particularly, in Shakespeare’s case, to cut out all the minor characters, boring poetry and unimportant subplots, and get right to the sex and the killing.”

Given the boys’ voracious appetite for cutting the crap and getting to the juicy bits – to date, the company has reduced The Complete History of America, The Bible: The Complete Word of God, Wagner’s Ring Cycle (into 30 minutes, for their first TV show on Britain’s Channel 4), All the Great Books, Western Civilisation: The Complete Musical and Completely Hollywood (“for those who find literature too intimidating”) – it’s surprising they waited a decade for the recognition they now enjoy. 

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare began as an hour-long piece at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1987, when the RSC (founded six years previously) consisted of three young comedians – Daniel Singer, Jess Winfield and Adam Long – and one very silly idea. Today, the company has a stable of three dozen actors stationed on both sides of the Atlantic and a collection of glittering reviews from the world’s top-tier papers. “Stupendous, anchorless joy!” raved the Times’ critic of Shakespeare, while The New York Times called the performance “pithier than Python” (surely one of the highest compliments in comedy). The Financial Times weighed in with “gloriously, relaxingly funny”, and our own Time Out London ruled it “shamelessly heretical”.

Heretical, undoubtedly, but Shakespeare purists should not be turned off by what Tichenor calls their “reverent irreverence”. He admits that too much research goes into each show; they are pedantically accurate when they’re not getting facts wrong on purpose. As such, purists may relate even more than most to the piece. “Not only does everybody know Shakespeare,” explains Tichenor, “but everybody – regardless of country – has been taught it badly at school. We’ve all had to endure that; we share it as a common experience. Our show is not only a celebration of Shakespeare. It’s also a satire of how badly it’s been presented in the past how it needn’t have been.”

Intellectuals and satirists all, these guys are first and foremost comedians. That they have, for nearly 30 years, kept people laughing while tackling politics, religion, literature, film and western civilisation is no small boast, regardless of how long the Olivier Award people took to get around to them.

“In Hollywood cliché terms,” Tichenor muses, “we are the underdogs who win the championship at the end.” (He has a moment of trouble deciding between this metaphor and that of the tortoise in The Tortoise and the Hare).

Asked what has kept the troupe going for this long, the Californian funnyman says, “The subtext of all our scripts is that there are three charming idiots who think they can really reduce the topic. That they don’t know what they’re trying to do is impossible makes them appealing, I think.”

That, and – as absurd comic value goes – you can’t go far wrong with dinosaurs.

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) is at APA's Drama Theatre from September 8 to 20.