Woogie Jung, left, Tom Pavey and Efe Agwele: Reduced Shakespeare Company’s 2026 tour cast for The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare (Abridged). Picture: Mark Senior
FORTY five years ago, Adam Long, Daniel Singer and Jess Winfield first staged a 20-minute Hamlet at the Shakespeare-themed Renaissance Faires in California.
If brevity is the soul of wit, as espoused by the soon-to-be-terminated Polonius in Act Two, Scene Two of Hamlet, then the anti-nuclear political action committee accountant, Santa Rosa graphic artist and Santa Cruz lawyer had hit on a formula for compact comedy gold.
Long moved to the UK 35 years ago; the trio’s Reduced Shakespeare Company first toured the UK 31 years ago, since when The Complete Works have spent nine years at the Criterion Theatre in London’s West End, featured in two television specials and transferred to more than 20 countries.
Now, Long is at the directorial helm for the 30th anniversary tour of a “re-booted, re-imagined, reinvented and updated” Complete Works, still squeezing 37 plays and, very briefly, the Sonnets, into under two hours (including a 15-minute interval).
On RSC duty for the first time are Mountview Academy of Theatre MA graduate Efe Agwele, South Korean-born, London-based Woogie Jung, in his debut UK tour, and University of Oxford DPhil in Biology student Tom Pavey in his professional bow.
Tour understudy Kiran Raywilliams is a Bristol actor, rapper, poet and DJ, who played David in York company Pilot Theatre’s Run, Rebel in 2023-2024, by the way.
This is a young company, charged with injecting fresh energy into a comedy classic that opens with a copy of the First Folio on a plinth, ready to be shredded alive. The pace is fast, then faster still, but the comic timing is not always there, sometimes pushing too hard or rushed. Serving up the gory Titus Andronicus as a YouTube cookery tutorial, for example, lacks comic bite.
Ironically on such a stiflingly hot night (Wednesday), the cast needed to warm up their audience, whose response times quickened and noise levels rose once audience participation, both on stage and in the auditorium, became central to the show.
Acts of reduction vary from Coriolanus not being performed, on account of an aversion to the second part of his name, to the History Plays being conducted as a game of football with the crown passed like a hot potato from king to king (and King Lear shown the red card for being only a literary creation).
The comedy style is irreverent, gleefully silly at times, delivered with costume and prop changes by the dozen, shaking up Shakespeare like an earthquake but still with a love for Will’s wondrous works. Corniest gag? How about “I invited Shakespeare to the pub, but he was Bard.”
Not everything works, but in Chinese meal tradition, there is always another play coming up for comedic short shrift in the RSC’s taming of rather more than a Shrew.
All’s well that ends well too in Act Two’s focus on Hamlet, in particular a Freudian analysis of the suicidal Ophelia, acting out her psyche, with the audience split into three to play the parts of her Ego, Id and Superego (the three components of the mind defined by Sigmund Freud’s structural theory of personality).
To finish: Hamlet in 30 seconds, then in five seconds, and finally, backwards. Silence is the rest…and the rest is silence until the post-show discussion with chairs on the stage for the only time.
Reduced Shakespeare Company in The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare (Abridged), York Theatre Royal, until Saturday, 7.30pm plus 2.30pm Saturday matinee. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.