Adam Long: Reduced Shakespeare Company co-founder and director
THE new version of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), rebooted and re-imagined for the 30th anniversary tour, is squeezing into York Theatre Royal from July 7 to 11.
After nine years at the Criterion Theatre in London’s West End, two television specials and performances in more than 20 countries, the Reduced Shakespeare Company brings this updated and reinvented classic comedy to a new generation of audiences as Efé Agwele, Woogie Jung, Tom Pavey and Kiran Raywilliams take a rollercoaster ride through all 37 of the Bard’s plays.
Presented by The Theatre Chipping Norton and Selladoor Worldwide, through special arrangement with Music Theatre International, the 2026 version is written by director Adam Long and fellow Californian original writers and founder members Daniel Singer and Jess Winfield, who first teamed up when Adam was an accountant for an anti-nuclear political action committee, Daniel, a graphic artist in Santa Rosa and Jess, a lawyer in Santa Cruz.
Here come Hamlet told backwards, a micro-condensed Othello scored to a ukulele, a carnage-filled Titus Andronicus presented as a YouTube cookery tutorial and the History Plays as a manic football game between kings (although King Learis disqualified for being fictional).
“We started touring it here in 1995 – 31 years go – and in the first year we did it at this incredibly beautiful theatre in York,” recalls Adam. “We did a show in Leeds and then there was a three-day gap before York, and we got this phone-call saying, ‘could we do a show in Plymouth in between?’, so we drove all the way down to Plymouth and back again!”
The Reduced Shakespeare Company (RSC) had begun as a street theatre troupe in San Francisco Bay in the 1980s, busking 15-minute versions of Romeo And Juliet and Hamlet to earn a living.
Most of the performances were at ‘Renaissance Faires’ where the RSC often had to share the stage with belly dancers and sheep. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) was first performed at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1987, at 10am in a church basement.
From there, the RSC was invited to perform in Montreal, Tokyo, New York and London, and the rest is history, but what first drew Long and co to Shakespeare?
“I’m from California, where we were not forced to study it in the same way as you are here, so our love of Shakespeare came from seeing it live,” says Adam. “I loved Bugs Bunny and The Marx Brothers too and in my life they’re intertwined.”
The comedy style emerged from condensing the essentials of each play. “It comes down to what’s the plot and who are the characters? Like Romeo And Juliet is two teenagers high on hormones who make some bad decisions, and if that was on Netflix, you’d definitely watch it!” says Adam, who has lived in London for 35 years.
The Reduced Shakespeare Company’s 2026 tour cast for The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)
“We figured Romeo And Juliet was the play most people knew, along with Hamlet, so we book-end the show with those two plays. Romeo And Juliet gets a healthy 15 minutes; it’s like Romeo And Juliet shot out of a cannon: high-speed drama.
“We then highlight plays they’re less familiar with, like Titus Andronicus, the most gory play Shakespeare wrote – and one of the most gory plays I’ve encountered. It’s more gory than all Quentin Tarantino’s films condensed into one, so we devote only two minutes to it in the form of a YouTube cooking tutorial by Titus Andronicus.”
The Reduced Shakespeare Company version of Hamlet developed as the show did likewise. “When we got to the point where Ophelia killed herself, we thought it would be interesting to do a Freudian analysis, acting out her psyche, and the response was so good, we had to do an encore, where we did Hamlet in only 30 seconds,” says Adam.
“Demands came for another encore, so we did it in five seconds. Then we were all just sitting in the pub, thinking about what more we would do with it, and Jess, I think, suggested: ‘what if we were to do it backwards, like in a parlour game?’.”
Hamlet in reverse is now a staple of the show, but which plays were the hardest to adapt? “The Histories, because they’re not as funny as the tragedies, and they’re also not as well known,” says Adam.
“So we thought, ‘how do we take all the Histories and condense them into something that will be entertaining for the audience?’. It’s like a football game with the crown being passed from king to king and gradually we got it down to 90 seconds.”
Asked to pick a favourite Shakespeare play, Adam says: “I know it’s a predictable answer, but I do love Hamlet. I think that if I was a playwright and it was the only play I wrote, I would feel it was a job well done without having to write another 36 plays!”
The Reduced Shakespeare Company in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), York Theatre Royal, July 7 to 11, 7.30pm plus 2pm Thursday and 2.30pm Saturday matinees. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk Age guidance: Ten plus.