Shit-faced Shakespeare

Drunk people, eh. They’re really funny aren’t they? Like, REALLY funny. Really, really, funny. Funny. Really. You know, they get words wrong, repeat themselves, fall over, giggle a bit, shout a bit. And stuff. Who wouldn’t want to pay to see that?

Well, on the evidence of tonight’s excitably packed crowd at the Fringe’s salubrious box of delights, C venues, a heck of a lot of people do.

The formula, for the uninitiated, is thus: take one Shakespeare play (in this case, Much Ado About Nothing), reduce to an hour, and perform. Exceeeeeept: one of the six-strong cast, chosen at random, is drunk! Absolutely booze-boffed! Totally snozzle-faced! We know this because we’re shown the amount of sauce they’ve necked before curtain-up. Tonight, if you’re wondering, our poor Beatrice has bombed a whole can of Tennent’s and two big bottles of fizzy wine.

The Shakespeare, of course, is completely incidental to the spectacle, which is no bad thing given the cast of “classically trained” actors seem to have spent a whole weekend rehearsing it. So what, exactly, are we here for? To gawp and guffaw at a drunk person? Y’know, being drunk?

It’s the theatrical equivalent of bear-baiting; a boorish, hollering, hormonal ritual that you half expect to end with an actress pulling her pants down, defecating on stage whilst screeching snatches of Lady GaGa in between bouts of projectile vomiting. Whilst the audience cheer and call for more booze.

Clearly, there’s a market for Shit-faced Shakespeare at the Fringe. But lord knows why.