[Promising Pastiche]
Award-winning comic Penny Ashton has as soon as once more delved into traditional texts to current their tropes in a brand new mild. A mash-up of Shakespeare’s performs and modern-day actuality TV, The Tempestuous is a humorous and intelligent romp. Replete with cross-dressing, disguises, bawdy jokes, puns, wordplay, and musical numbers, it’s an excellently written script that Shakespeare himself can be pleased with.
Ashton enters the stage in a wonderful Elizabethan robe (impeccably designed by Elizabeth Whiting) and begins to set the scene in rhyming couplets and Shakespearean verbiage. We’re in Italy (certainly one of Shakespeare’s favorite settings). The king is lifeless, his brother has changed him on the throne, and his stunning daughter should be married off. Ashton proceeds, over the subsequent hour and a half, to weave for us a narrative of strong-willed ladies and weak-witted males. And witches, after all.
Shakespeare wrote some epic feminine characters in his time (though they have been carried out by male performers), and Ashton updates this feminist bent with barely extra fashionable sensibilities. Shakespearean comedies farcically overturn the established order earlier than restoring it within the conclusion; right here the pure order restored is certainly one of female empowerment and real love.
There’s no have to be intimidated by means of Shakespeare’s language for Ashton is clearly a grasp of it. She cleverly weaves fashionable phrases into the fashion of Elizabethan speech with exact comedian timing, and hides traces ripped straight from Shakespeare all through this new textual content. Each line is obvious and every character is distinct – which is saying one thing, contemplating Ashton brings to life at least 13 over the course of the story.
The Tempestuous gives the expertise of seeing a Shakespeare for the primary time, although carried out solo. This provides a enjoyable gimmick and Ashton’s unimaginable efficiency makes the quick adjustments in character (by way of voice, physique and area alone) look straightforward, however I nearly wished to really feel how arduous it really should have been. Not solely was Ashton taking part in a number of characters in dialogue with each other, however then a few of these characters don disguises and are taking part in elements of their very own. That is such an exquisite farce that will have been even funnier if we had been made viscerally conscious of simply how absurd it’s. There was one stunning second when Ashton entered the stage, solely to understand she was utilizing the mistaken voice, so she was compelled to show round and enter once more. It was moments like these – the real errors – that made me actually chortle as a result of it highlighted the utter silliness of all of it.
It was partly this sense of meta-theatricality that was missing for me. Not that there was a lot of a fourth wall to talk of, however certainly one of Shakespeare’s best tropes was poking enjoyable at theatre itself. A solo Shakespearean romp resembling this is able to have been the right place to herald that sense of self-awareness, permitting the slickness of efficiency to drop away so we may see the farce of 1 actor taking part in 13 characters. The moments the place Ashton was compelled to authentically reply to a mistake or to the viewers gave me a pleasant glimpse of what this may need appeared like, and I wished extra.
Although the present is in nice form for its first ever run, general I wished extra. Extra props, extra costumes, extra fanfare, extra parody, extra use of the small set. The occasions once we received massive bodily gags from Ashton have been a number of the greatest, however only some have been peppered all through. A few of the musical numbers (although very entertaining and superbly carried out) felt like they wished to be greater, grander. To conjure the epic-ness of such archetypal characters and tales isn’t any small feat, and I felt that The Tempestuous fell just a bit brief. I’d like to see extra components added and an actual heavy lean into the farce because the play continues to develop.
However, Penny Ashton’s newest providing is a humorous and sensible homage to maybe probably the most well-known Western playwright. In the event you love Shakespeare, or simply wish to see the Bard in a brand new mild, that is the present for you.
The Tempestuous performs Basement Theatre 13-Seventeenth June 2023
