[title]
The four hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death this summer sent the whole theatre industry into a frenzied burst of commemorations and cash-ins. There have been festivals, guided walks, talks, and so many feverish ‘Midsummer Night’s Dreams’ that the whole fringe theatre sector should be sent to a sleep therapist. On tour since the summer, comedy troupe Spymonkey’s ‘Complete Deaths’ is the long, rattling fart at the end of all this pomp and circumstance.
It’s been adapted and directed by Tim Crouch, who’s best known for a more serious kind of experimental theatre (‘An Oak Tree’ or ‘Adler & Gibb’) that’s obsessed by layers of reality. So it makes sense that this is basically a meta-theatrical conceit, albeit a very, very silly one: the troupe set out to perform every death in Shakespeare’s plays, under the auspices of a pretentious director who they rebel against more and more. Each death is marked by a buzzer going off, and a digital display counts down how many deaths are left to go.
Aided and abetted by designer Lucy Bradridge, they’ve come up with an utterly bonkers theme for each play. ‘Antony & Cleopatra’ gets its gory climax courtesy of Cleo dancing with glittery snake men, burlesque style, while ‘Macbeth’ parodies physical theatre experimentalism by mixing fake Scottish accents with wibbly hand gestures and powder blue PVC kilts. The troupe have also got a few more serious meditations on the nature of acting stuffed up their codpieces - they’re whipped out in quiet moments, but these serious bits don’t have much to say to the riotous business of the show as a whole.
Except, perhaps, that a death is a weird moment for an actor (as well as someone going through it for real): you get a flurry of violence, gore, silliness or anticlimax, then after your big moment in the limelight you’re offstage for good. Spymonkey’s four performers are dragged off after each death, and the buzzer cuts their emotional moments short. Their turns on stage can feel baggy, over long, hammy - but we miss them when they’re gone.