Reviews

I haven’t been to the Annex Theatre since, I think, the mid-1990s, when I did handwriting analysis for the audience before and after the show, a fit woo-woo trick for a writer. So that’s how up I am on this scene, which is fantastic but not where I’ve been. Lately.

So it with eerie pleasure that I return for “Drunk Shakespeare,” a new trope that is sweeping the nation and not that far removed from the usual Shakespeare at the level of late-night gag skits.

Here we are, greeted with a drink by one of the actors whom I remember from when we were both thirty and at a party, and I don’t remember your name, either. 

I can’t not be here.

When young, all theatre is possible, if only on the off-chance of gazing upon some person, on the stage. I can look and look at you and not be considered rude.

Now, as it turns out, Drunk Shakespeare is based on a valid theatrical norm, and that is, that we theatre artists are TRAINED in Shakespeare at school and should be able to do it, all of it, on one rehearsal, learning our lines as need be, and, in fact, should be able to do it drunk. Every single actor in the cast.

And the audience, who have seen every Shakespeare play there is, over the years, can follow any of the major pieces, regardless of production value.

As it turns out, that is not only accurate, and a fine stunt, but it is also an evening of Transcendent Revelation, for that is what needs to be for Shakespeare. 

What are your pronouns? 

Care to find out?

What is Macbeth? He is a fellow with a lot of capacity who happens to overstep at a critical moment and be destroyed. At the start, he is doing warfare in battles of succession for his superior, King Duncan, and is capable of killing with an odd zeal, being compared to a butcher: 

"For brave Macbeth — well he deserves that name —/Disdaining fortune, with his brandish’d steel,/Which smoked with bloody execution,/Like valour’s minion carved out his passage/Till he faced the slave;/Which ne’er shook hands, nor bade farewell to him,/Till he unseam’d him from the nave to the chaps,/And fix’d his head upon our battlements."

Society is now going to ask this person, whom they have trained and demanded to be a killing machine, to STOP at the right moment — and is unable to contain what it has unleashed.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, source material for many of Shakespeare’s history plays, is replete with accounts of what happened when the organizing government of Rome fell and the various Anglo-Saxon estates vied for supremacy. It was a few centuries of almost nonstop civil war, with each fellow proclaiming himself King at the drop of a hat and did not end until the ascent of the Tudor line, of which Queen Elizabeth was one of the earliest scions. In this grand melee of the times, Macbeth is simply one of the losers. 

Who has the blood to be king is a matter of almost no consequence. Every nobleman does, and the cobbling together of alliances, and keeping them together, is how kingships were constructed.

The principal problem with Macbeth is that he doesn’t have the stuff to balance diplomacy with battle. Otherwise, he would have been a nobleman so highly placed that he had enough power to do almost anything, in many ways, more power than the King. And that’s the irony of it.

While watching this romp that was not a complete reenvisioning but not a densely packed linguistic legacy performance, in the hands of those who “owned it,” I was struck with the overarching structure of the work. And that was the value of the experience. 

Unfortunately, “Drunk Shakespeare” was presented in a single performance. Hopefully, the Annex will try another of the skits. I will be there.