Theatre N16 2 – 13 October. Reviewed by Claire Roderick
2016 has been a busy year for academics – celebrating the 400th anniversary of the death of the great writer Cervantes… and a little known hack from the Midlands. Honestly, avoiding Shakespeare this year has been impossible, with what feels like 400 different productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream popping up, and every man and his dog having a go at one of his plays. Even Selfridges got in on the act, with Beatrice and Benedick disrupting innocent people’s shopping experience.
Robert Crighton’s superb one man show Undead Bard takes a sideways look at the enduring appeal of Shakespeare by “exploring his afterlife”.
The first half of the show, “The Shakespeare Delusion” takes the form of a spoof lecture by the very intense Professor Ashton. The professor’s research into the question of authorship begins gently but rapidly descends into lunacy as, between brilliantly outrageous proofs and theories about why Shakespeare couldn’t have written any of his plays, we watch the professor descend into paranoia about roaming gangs of violent intellectuals and listen in giggling disbelief as snippets of his disastrous personal life seep into the lecture. Crighton’s portrayal of the awkward and pitiful academic is touching and hysterical, and he exudes enough frantic energy to power the national grid.
In part two, “Shakespeare: The Ever Living”, Shakespeare’s spirit enters Crighton’s body when he performs the Rite of Mumm-Ra. Anyone who can shoehorn the ThunderCats into Shakespeare deserves plaudits, I’m just thankful Snarf didn’t pop up. What follows is a meandering but entertaining riff on Shakespeare’s contemporaries, with some modern Elizabethan insults, and a surprisingly deep and insightful analysis of originality referencing classical education and Garfield the cat. “Why can’t you let me die?” wails Shakespeare, after a particularly salient section about audiences wanting the familiar and not new writing. Crighton never stands still, inhabiting a character somewhere between Derren Brown and Noel Edmunds, but funnier.
The two halves complement each other, rather than form a coherent whole, but these are two different pieces of writing with a similar theme rather than two acts of the same play, a fact that Crighton makes very clear.
Crighton manages to make this show educational as well as funny, including lots of facts and actual theories about Shakespeare as part of the comedy. The Shakespeare Delusion would be a genius addition to any Shakespeare conference in that tricky post-lunch session.
This is a show for Bardophiles and Bardophobes alike. Love him or hate him, you just can’t avoid old Will this year, so just roll with it and go to see Undead Bard for a night of literature, lunacy and Lion-O.