“It’s like… like a pig sewn to a horse and sent to run up a hill, good sir, aye it does not make sense!” – Ewan Campbell, Bard To The Bone, SFF 2014
Though we have gained clarity, logic and efficiency with the development of modern English, we have also lost one of the greatest pleasures of language: flowery, nonsensical, several-lines-long insults. The Post-Haste Players’ entirely improvised Bard to the Bone excels at taking the best bits of Elizabethan English and spinning them into amusing and insulting new contortions.
Billed as “the play Shakespeare wished he had written”, you’d be forgiven for expecting a morose evening of complex literary references and a slew of tragic deaths. But, you’d be wrong. This is primarily an improvisation game, with a plot that centres on something brand new each night. For us, a “shrimp peeler” provided the dramatic action.
As you might expect, a Shakespearean-style play about a shrimp peeler is bound to takes some bizarre twists. With only a few stools for props, and an excellent live soundtrack provided by Bryce Halliday, a truly disturbing world unfurled on stage. It begins when a prawn prophesies the rise of the “prawn people”, while a “fair maiden” grapples with being forced into a marriage despite her heart belonging to a mysterious “bearded man”.
What the plot lacks in logic is more than made up for by the players’ wit and dramatic talents. Ewan Campbell, the bearded lover, showcases an acerbic sense of humour with lines such as “it’s like a chicken wrapped in leather and sent to walk down a plank,” delivered with delightfully rolled ‘r’s and a wry smile. Oliver Burton as the evil prince Marcus Malcom Markam (or occasionally Malcom Malcom Markam) brought a serious dose of absurdity, transfiguring into a “prawn man” that could have come straight out of The Mighty Boosh.
If you were expecting pointed insights into the Bard and his characters, you won’t find them here. Besides a couple of references, like the fact that the arras (or curtain) is so “often the place of betrayal”, the performance has very little to do with Shakespeare’s actual plays. But for audiences who are sick of Hamlet’s whining anyway, this is an entertaining and insult-laden show by some highly skilled improvisation actors.
You can buy tickets to the final performance of Bard to The Bone now, and follow the Post-Haste Players through their Facebook page.
Reviewed by Emily Meller.
