Most enthusiastic Shakespeare fans are familiar with The Reduced Shakespeare Company by this point. Their fast-paced skit-based pastiches of Shakespeare and other major literary figures have been delivered since the late 80s with pleasing consistency – indeed their first vaudevillian escapade The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) has in my experience become a staple for university acting troupes to roll out.

The RSC is touring their latest Bardophilic mash-up William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (Abridged) which has just hit Oxford. The ‘recovered text’ gives the troupe an opportunity to do their most sprawling mash-up yet, whereby Shakespeare has yet to exercise the discipline of his later works so every character, device and plot he would later use in employed here in a gargantuan epic that the actors have seen fit to cut down.

The RSC’s productions have been described as ‘new vaudevillian’ and are pantomimic with intent. They draw attention to their modest staging; slim number of actors relative to a huge cast of characters; and do their utmost to inspire groans from the audience with dedicatedly terrible puns. What sets them above the average silly semi-improvisational troupe is that the Disney jokes, pop culture references and fourth-wall breaking is built on a solid bedrock of appreciation for Shakespeare.

William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (Abridged) does a really solid job of being irreverent and reverential of the Bard’s work. The crowd-pleasing, fast-paced style does not mask a genuinely solid ability to dive into and manipulate Shakespearean verse on the actors’ part. Jokes range from being broad as a barn door to some fiercely witty inversions and deconstructions of obscure Shakespearean lines. It remains accessible to the casual theatre-goer and there’s a rich layer of humour beneath that for people who really know the canon.

I laughed the whole way through.    ★★★★★    Fenton Coulthurst   9^th May 2017