We’ve seen the films and the stage productions where taverns are filled with rowdy extras or drunken clowns who provide comic relief to the main, frequently tragic, action. And were most of the people in that late-night audience drinking? You bet they were.)īoth these shows address an unspoken desire, I think, to return to an authentically Shakespearean (you’ll pardon the pun) spirit. (In the spirit of full disclosure, however, I confess that the largely college-aged audience I saw it with at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe loved it. For this admittedly biased spectator, the S-t-Faced Shakespeare performance I saw fell between two stools: the actor wasn’t drunk enough to be really out of control, and in that context, through no fault of the actors, the performance of Shakespeare wasn’t compelling and served no end other than to stall until the next drunken and hopefully high-larious interruption. What the warning on the Drunk Shakespeare website doesn’t say is that watching drunk people attempt to not be drunk is hysterical…or can be…sometimes. Our drunk actors are on a regular rotation system and carefully monitored at all times. (A “health warning” posted on the Drunk Shakespeare website proclaims “We do not condone excessive drinking. The modus operandi of these two shows is to have one actor consume a considerable amount of alcohol and then, while under the influence (and supposedly the supervision of his or her fellows), attempt to perform a previously rehearsed role in a Shakespeare play. I’m talking of the companies that perform S-t-Faced Shakespeare (which originated in the UK but now holds performances in Boston, Austin, Atlanta, and the Twin Cities), and the less alliterative but equally descriptive Drunk Shakespeare, which currently has performances in both New York and Chicago. There’s a newish trend in Shakespeare performance, which is to bring the alcohol consumed by audiences in the taverns and inn yards where his plays were first performed, on to the stage to be consumed by the performers themselves. Photo courtesy of the Back Room Shakespeare Project. Christopher Costello and Victoria Blade, Macbeth.
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