ON radio a few days ago a schoolgirl was asked to explain the plot of Othello. "It was about a black Moor," she said, "who goes to Venice and marries the daughter of a nobleman. Which," she said laconically, "doesn't go down well, basically.."
Something of the same economy of interpretation is used by the members of the Reduced Shakespeare Company in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
(abridged) at the Opera House. Reduction is the theme, but absurdity is not enough, and the professionalism of this production is what saves it from, slapstick.
It takes a particular kind of inspiration to present Titus Andonicus as a cookery programme for television (the only way to deal with Shakespeare in his Quentin Tarantino phase), or all the history plays together as a game of American football, or, as a curtain-call, the three minute Hamlet backwards; the tightly measured pace and the athleticism of the players offer the relieving comedy of satirical compression at its best.
It isn't slap-bang-wallop stuff all the way through: Ross McKenzie, Chris Andrew Mellon and Matt Rippy are simply too good for that, and despite the Americanised evangelical fervour established by director Adam Long, there is a moment in which Shakespeare's truth shines through. For that minute the audience is silent: bewitched until released into laughter again.
