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Shakespeare & Beyond

Shakespeare in a bar

Backroom Shakespeare Project
Backroom Shakespeare Project
Backroom Shakespeare Project

Christopher Costello and Victoria Blade, Macbeth. Photo courtesy of the Back Room Shakespeare Project.

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.

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. 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. (A “health warning” posted on the Drunk Shakespeare website proclaims “We do not condone excessive drinking. Our drunk actors are on a regular rotation system and carefully monitored at all times. Drinking in moderation can be fun. Drinking to excess can ruin your life. We promote healthy drinking.”)

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. 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.

(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. And were most of the people in that late-night audience drinking? You bet they were.)

Both these shows address an unspoken desire, I think, to return to an authentically Shakespearean (you’ll pardon the pun) spirit. 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. In plays depicting scheming royals, interchangeable lords, and magical sprites, all of whom are speaking words that can sometimes be challenging, the behavior of a bunch of drunks seems an accurate depiction of a more rowdy era that’s of a piece with Shakespeare’s robust language and at the same time feels timeless and reassuringly familiar.

More successful, though, at returning us to a semblance of Shakespeare’s time and place is the work of Chicago’s Back Room Shakespeare Project. Co-created by Samuel Taylor and Kelley Ristow, the Project began with the belief that “Shakespeare’s plays don’t belong in our polite, delicate theatres” and that in fact, “Shakespeare’s theatre was a goddam madhouse, and that somewhere along the way we all lost sight of that.” The Project attempts to bridge the distance between Shakespeare’s theatre and our own by performing his plays while adhering to four basic rules: Serious Actors, No Director, One Rehearsal, and — most importantly — At a Bar.

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Audience expectations and theater etiquette: Shakespeare's time vs. today — September 27, 2018