Sh!tfaced-Shakespeare® is finally ready to tackle the greatest dramatic work ever committed to page in the English language, Hamlet. The story of a whiny lad who goes a bit loopy and does some stabbings, featuring foul language, outrageous behaviour, terrible singing, rapidly expelled bodily fluids and dangerous swordplay, Shakespeare has long been considered ‘cultural’. Think of it like Game of Thrones with less boobs (probably).
Following Sh!t-faced Showtime®: Oliver With a Twist! (27th March – 12th April) and Sh!t-faced Shakespeare®: The Taming of the Shrew (17th April – 1st June), Magnificent Bastard Productions continue their extensive run of dates at Leicester Square Theatre by hamming up Hamlet (29th June – 14th September).
Each performance takes a cast of professionally trained, Shakespearian actors and every night one carefully selected company member is tasked with drinking for a full four hours prior to show time. The remainder of the sober cast are tasked with wrangling our drunken hero through a 70 minute adapted script trying their level best to keep the show ‘on the rails’ while incorporating into the world of the play whatever drunken shenanigans are thrown at them. With the original text reduced to the primest theatrical cuts and no time to spare, every night is a high-energy race to the finish through an ever changing series of drunken detours.
Magnificent Bastard Productions were just friends who loved creating unexpected and unpredictable theatre at music festivals such as Secret Garden Party. Sh!t-faced now performs across the UK, Australia and USA in Boston, Atlanta and Austin. They sell-out at the Edinburgh and Brighton Fringes annually, and in 2015 expanded into Sh!t-faced Showtime®, a pissed-up hour of harmonious Broadway showtunes. In addition to these UK dates the company will be presenting Sh!t-faced shows at Brighton fringe, York Fringe, Edinburgh Festival Fringe, in the USA and in Australia this year.
Founding member of Sh!t-faced Shakespeare® Rev. Lewis Ironside said, “Having remorselessly mucked about on the UK’s Fringe Theatre circuit for several years a small, and relatively modest, comedy show finally exploded onto the West End stage some four years ago. This “little show that could” has since gone onto wow hundreds of thousands of audience members, tour the globe, win numerous awards, sell packed houses across three continents and become a beloved staple of the West End scene. Whether you consider it high art or merely disrespectful, lowest common denominator nonsense, one cannot deny its indisputable place among the pantheon of modern British theatre… The Play That Goes Wrong is taking bookings through to summer.”
