English theatre review - The Complete Works Of Shakespeare (abridge),performed by The Reduced Shakespeare Company.

English theatre review

The Complete Works Of Shakespeare (abridge),

performed by The Reduced Shakespeare Company.

The actors: Christian Malcom

Walter Lewis

Rick Bland

The Complete Works of Shakespeare (abridge) is about all Shakespeare’s plays performed in about 2 hours. It is a hilariously fast moving comedy.

The Complete Works of Shakespeare (abridge) starts with a brief, completely inaccurate biography of Shakespeare’s life mixed up with Hitler’s by Christian Malcom. Then the three actors introduced themselves and talked about the plays that they were going to perform. The way that the actors started the play by giving information about what they are going to perform is really good because the audience will know what the actors are performing. When Christian Malcom presented the inaccurate biography of Shakespeare, the audience straight away knew that the play is going to be a hilariously funny play. When the actors introduced themselves, the background lights on the stage faded away and only the spotlight were lighted. The spotlight shown to the actor who was speaking to the audience and not to the other actors who are not speaking so that the audience would know who is speaking.

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After the introduction of The Complete Works of Shakespeare (abridge), the spotlight dims out leaving the stage completely pitch black and the actors prepared for the first act. The stage where the actors performed is a basic stage. The backgrounds of the stage were never changed through out the play and there were no huge props like a table or a bed used.

Here is a rough sketch of the stage where the actors performed.

The lights were on again and Walter ...

This is a preview of the whole essay

Here is a rough sketch of the stage where the actors performed.

The lights were on again and Walter Lewis appeared in a Shakespearian costume and introduced the first act. In the first act, some of the play the actors performed was a rap version of Othello, a cooking show version of Titus Andronicus and Shakespeare’s history plays in a football game. After each of Shakespeare plays was presented, the actors have less than a minute to change their costume. Sometimes the actors even came in wearing a wrong costume.

There are not much sounds effect used in the first act. The lighting designer used the same lighting effect using the spotlight when the actors introduced themselves, in the rap version Of Othello. The actors played their parts very well. They moved around the stage quite a lot and used a lot of movement and gesture. For example, the actors were dancing merrily all over the stage when performing a short section of Romeo and Juliet.

The second act is entirely devoted to the play Hamlet. Here the actors picked a lady from the audience to play Ophelia and to scream in a dramatic way. The rest of the audience also get to participate. The audience assisted the lady by saying lines that were told to say by the actors to create a stress mood to the lady. When the lady screamed, the background light changed from yellow to dark red and only the lady’s face was shown with white light from a spotlight. I really liked the way that the lighting designer used the lights to create more dramatic mood to the screaming part.

The lighting designer used good light effects to set the scenes. In one part where the actors performed, the lights turned blue to indicate a night scene. Sometimes the lights were too dark and it was difficult to see the actors.

The props that the actors have used were little props like plastic swords, a plastic dagger, a vase and more. It is important to use some kind of props when presenting a play because the props would make the play wore interesting and more understandable. The actors used appropriate props in each scene.

The Complete Works of Shakespeare (abridge) ended with the "Hamlet" sequence, which the actors re-enacted three times, at double-speed, hyper-speed and even backwards.

Overall The Complete Works of Shakespeare (abridge) was a very successful comedy play and I really enjoyed it. I am really impressed on the actor’s performances. The actors took their parts well in each scene.