The Complete Deaths is an interesting concept. Theatre company Spymonkey takes each of the 75 onstage deaths from Shakespeare’s plays and acts them out over a couple of hours. The production asks questions about the nature of theatre, and why we attend plays – to be entertained, or to be intellectually stimulated.
The annoying thing about The Complete Deaths was that I really wanted to like it. Shakespeare doesn’t want us to be reverential about his work; he wants us to poke fun and be snide and irreverent and play with new ideas and be a bit silly.
But I can’t deal with anything as silly as this.
The slapstick style of The Complete Deaths seemed to appeal to a lot of the audience. When a crotch-grabbing scene within the first few minutes got a resounding laugh from the crowd, I knew that I was in the minority of viewers. A few moments made me smile, but the pantomime humour that prevailed throughout generally left me cold.
The parts that I did enjoy were the actual passages of Shakespeare, although they seemed relatively few. I particularly enjoyed Toby Park’s musical rendition of the ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun’ passage from Cymbeline, and was quite hopeful about hearing Petra Massey’s ‘Ophelia’ (a running joke throughout – it’s an offstage death, and so outside the remit of the play).
I never thought of myself as a Shakespeare purist before, but give me a strait-laced BBC adaption over this. I’m certainly not the target audience, so by all means, go to the Oxford Playhouse, laugh, enjoy the silliness. ‘Tis all one to me… ★☆☆☆☆ @BookingAround 7th June 2016
