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Reduced Shakespeare Company by Adam Horovitz |
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All the Great Books (Abridged!) by The Reduced Shakespeare Company review by Adam Horovitz The Everyman, Cheltenham Wednesday, November 19 The Reduced Shakespeare Company have, in one guise or another, spent the last ten years mercilessly abridging the great works of literature and fiction - Shakespeare's plays, the history of America and The Bible - to great comedic effect, all the while displaying a great fondness for, and knowledge of, what they were satirising. Their latest production, All the Great Books (Abridged!), follows in that vein, but at The Everyman last week it seemed as if the company had taken the joke a step too far. Not that the company were anything less than excellent - the actors' physicality and wit held the show together even when one of them ad-libbed so well, and so topically, that his colleagues were almost unable to control their laughter. The problem was the script - a paper-thin satire of the impulse in modern society to list this week's Best-100-anything. It was certainly clever and, at times, extremely funny - the description of Little Women as if the characters were in an American Football team being a fine example - but it hadn't the resonance of the previous shows; it slithered into glibness too often for comfort. There were redeeming features - the internal monologues of James Joyce's Ulysses slowly becoming an argumentative dirty phone-call - but on the whole the show wandered from joke to joke, dismissing too many books in a single sentence. This was, perhaps, the writer's intent, but All the Great Books (Abridged!) was too rooted in pop culture to offer anything more than a few easy chuckles, whereas its antecedents had always offered so much more than mere mirth. (This article originally appeared in the Stroud News And Journal November 2003) © Adam Horovitz
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