Rating: 9
Catalina Theatre (Wilson's Wharf)
Taking the piss out of Shakespeare is nothing new. Overseas, the Bard's words have been re-worked to much merriment all round by many, including the Royal Shakespeare Company, the inimitable Stephen Fry and Alan Bennett and various goofy Yanks such as Reed Martin, Austin Tichenor and Matt Rippy.
In London's Piccadilly Circus the tiny (very intimate...) Victorian theatre, the Criterion at Piccadilly Circus, has played host to this very production for years.
The production is becoming a little like The Mouse Trap - when in London go see the Reduced Shakespeare Company.
The same company in London under different guise, also does an equally funny reduced Bible and American History.
So, now Shakespeare - his comedies, tragedies and a bit more beside reduced to around an hour and half comes to Durban. And you just gotta go - or else a plague on both our houses...
Producing is Themi Venturas, while taking on the taxing task of pumping out those plays et al are three of South Africa's finest actors Michael Gitten, Neil Coppen and Steven Stead.
All must lose a kilo or two per performance, such is the marathon of reducing Shkspr - and constantly keeping up the spontaneity, snigger and sarcasm quotient - night after night.
You want your Hamlet with a totally over-the-top vomiting Ophelia - try Coppen's horribly be-wigged skipping mad maid. Enough to make any prince of Denmark lean towards those slings and arrows.
As for the murdered king -or let's just call him dead dad - Denmark's newly departed has been reduced to a hellish moaning sock puppet.
The three totter forth in fetching black tights, flowing shirts, flowing wigs with flowing water and foul flowers of plastic and besmirch all that is Will's holy cows.
Doth Capulet bite his thumb at Montague? Too bloody right and a right royal fight with foils (and oh such foils ...) ensues.
As for that little slug-a-bed Juliet - doth she still teach the torches to burn bright? Doth she still "hang upon the cheek of night like a rich jewel in an Ethiope's ear"? Well she might if it weren't the manic Coppen again plunging a retractable plastic dagger here, there and everywhere.
Othello (Coppen with life belt and plastic boats - you have to be there ...), Julius Caesar (an effete Gitten giving a new meaning to "lend me your ears"). Anthony and Cleopatra (another of Coppen's worst wigs and a vomiting, asp clutching Cleo), a running rugby version of pass the crown for Henry V, Richard III, King Lear, King John "full back to the hunchback".
Who needs that Scottish play!
We do!
Stead, Gittens and Coppen lurching around in the hip kilts and with worse wigs with even worse Billy Connolly accents.
It's all enough to make a purist grab that retractable knife and plunge.
Funny - very funny - fast and furious and you haven't even got to the second half and that Danish play. Stead's hilariously Olivierish - liverish? Hamlet. Gritten's Polonius and "others" and that Coppen Ophelia.
Hamlet - reduced, faster, backwards, with mass audience participation, with screaming as an extra. Alas, you thought you knew it well. You have no idea. Go forth, take the family.
Nightly at 8pm (except Mondays), Saturdays and Sundays at 6pm. Until August 10. Tickets R65 or R50 (students, pensioners). Bookings Computicket.