The School of Night

It’s an odd clash of cultural genres, but audience-wise The School of Night is curiously reminiscent of Silent Disco, the popular festival event where punters wear headphones, listen to a choice of different songs and thus all dance, chant and cheer at different junctures.

This is how the laughs work at The School of Night, in which five modern dandies create a new Shakespearean play each afternoon. A snatch of seemingly impenetrable dialogue elicits a knowing chuckle from one chap at the back; a larger faction guffaws at a broader bit of physical humour, and a younger fellow goes into paroxysms as they pastiche a specific facet of the Bard’s work which passes the rest of us by.

This show evidently isn’t for everyone. Originally (re)convened by the late Ken Campbell, the assembled players are a modern embodiment of a 16^th century sect rumoured to have written Shakespeare’s plays by channelling various muses. Knowledge of that backstory is useful as this collective also makes much of channelling ethereal sources, without ever explicitly explaining what's going on.

The main muse for their new play is the audience, who is encouraged to offer a standard array of improv suggestions: themes, memories, even modern authors. They make an active attempt to explain their in-construction plot by reinterpreting it via more recent writers, but the show is most rewarding when one of them breaks character and explains, without flounce, what Shakespearean theme his colleague is currently attempting.

The School of Night is frequently bewildering and teeters perilously on the precipice of smugness, but you might just learn something, like it or not.