A classical actor who appeared in a recent production of Othello told me that the cast was alarmed by the murders being met on many nights by blasts of laughter. This may be due to audiences having seen the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s 1987 show The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Abridged) during its long West End runs or world tours. Or other examples of the trend for carved-up Bard that this alernative “RSC” started, including Spymonkey’s The Complete Deaths, making central an incidental aspect of Long’s shortening: the climactic body pile-ups.
At Adam Long’s revival of the show, co-written by Long, Daniel Singer and Jess Winfield, it is apparent, from interval conversations, that many who were taken to The Complete Works as teenagers are now bringing their own. Topical tweaks acknowledge this. Louis Theroux, a sixth-former when the original version premiered, has grown up to get a gag in this iteration, as have other contemporary phenomena, including Ozempic.
The central joke, though, continues to be trimming five acts down to five minutes or fewer. The gruesome climax of Titus Andronicus staged as a TV cookery show becomes about reduction in two ways. The childish – such as the oldest joke in Shakespearean studies, about the last two syllables of Coriolanus – jostles with the scholarly. A contention that the same basic plot is shared by the 14 comedies – here done as a frantic anthology – keeps the running time at a brisk hour and 40 minutes, including the interval, but also makes a point about the narrative thriftiness of a busy working dramatist. This reflects an overall approach of performing cartwheels and pratfalls on a tightrope between reducing and traducing.
There is audience participation (at one point involving my copy of the theatre programme) that culminates in an extraordinary new genre of tragic pantomime, with sections of the audience hollering different parts of Ophelia’s subconscious in a Freudian spin on her breakdown scene.
Before the Reduced Shakespeare Company, Sir Tom Stoppard did something similar in his Fifteen-Minute Hamlet (1976), which comes down to two minutes in a coda; Stoppard also created a 30-minute Merchant of Venice for schools in 2005. So that other great English dramatist is a friendly ghost at this revival, the “RSC” Hamlet leaving out Rosencrantz and Guildenstern because “they’ve got their own play” and, in a finale attempting to get the play down to seconds, aiming to speed up Stoppard’s stopwatch.
To work, the abridgement demands three fantastically engaging and flexible performers and this revival finds them. The conceit requires Efé Agwele to be able to deliver a classically spoken and emotive Hamlet, which she does amid lightning-flash characterisations. Also excelling at those are Woogie Jung, who charms the audience, and professional debutant Tom Pavey (a charming Ophelia), charged with antagonising us.
There is a history of high-class farce flourishing during dark times – Michael Frayn’s Noises Off has brought solace during recessions and wars – and, at another time when big laughs are badly needed, these eviscerated classics should provide them for most.
At Bristol Old Vic until 28 March. Then touring until 11 July
• This article was amended on 29 & 30 March 2026 to correct the spelling of Woogie Jung’s surname in a picture caption and to add details of the co-writers of The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Abridged).
