Plucky cast amazingly deliver Shakespeare without a script
Whose Line Is It Anyway? was a long-running improvised show where a team of comedian/actors were given a title or topic and asked to make up a story, preferably an amusing one, for a recorded studio audience.
It never ceased to amaze me how they did it, to make up comic songs which rhymed and were funny. Who knows if the performers were given a little prior help with their sketches? There certainly seemed to be canned laughter involved.
Unscripted Shakespeare on the other hand, is the real thing, live onstage. An audience member pitches in a favourite food item (haddock) and another is asked for a suitable adjective. “Flop” was agreed – no idea why but the accents onstage and in the seats were all from the USA – and the players set about weaving together a comedy in the style of Elizabethan theatre. Elizabeth the First, you understand.
In this they largely succeeded, if the belly laughs and chuckles from a mid-evening crowd were a reliable yardstick. I often wonder, cynical critic that I am, how much crowd mirth is down to the amount of Deuchars consumed. I’d had nothing of course. Still, it was full of sweetness (guaranteed on the flyers) and occasionally funny. It really is hard though, to come up not only with rhyming couplets, but to do it in Shakespearean iambic pentameter, live onstage.
That the cast managed to at least try is a tribute to their pluckiness and energy. Occasionally they managed a pretty decent stage whisper (quite useful in adding some structure to a narrative being invented by three performers and a musician/dog) or a soliloquy which not only raised sustained titters but which also moved on the emerging plot. Two additional plots were added to give the usual intrigue a bawdiness, with a handful of costume props and a lot of heavy lifting through mime.
Maestro Sebastian Hochman vitally energised the often shaky dialogue with musical squibs and cues, and as a cute dog. Not sure why this show exists, but I'm glad it does.
Thorn and Petal Stick: UnScripted Shakespeare, Venue 40, theatre at C ARTS | C venues | C alto, 8.20pm, until August 24
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