Who we are

Left to right:

Annie Stanford, Richard Lyford-Pyke, Costa Hagi, Adrian Mulraney, Andrew Gray, David A. James, Lisa Jacques, Monique Zucco and Andrew Bradsworth.

The cast

Duration: 90 minutes

Cast:

Jeffrey Bryant Jones as Shakespeare (formerly Andrew Gray)

Annie Stanford (all important female characters)

Adrian Mulraney (all important male characters)

Musicians:

Lisa Jacques (vocals)

David A. James (flutes)

Andrew Bradsworth (guitar)

Costa Hagi (bass)

Monique Zucco (drums)

Dramaturge: Graham Pitts

Director: Wolf Heidecker

Sound and lighting: Richard Lyford-Pyke

Highlights.

S/PEARE: Did I bathe in fiery floods or reside in thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice? Have I been imprison’d in the viewless winds and blown with restless violence round about the pendant world? Well, I’m not telling. For one thing, I have only been dead these 400 years. I am but a spring corpse. And we dead souls have responsibilities.

S/PEARE: So why am I here, you ask? Well, I do have a lot of eternity on my hands these days. It gives me the opportunity to entertain you sub lunar creatures still trying to have the time of your lives. And, damn it, so you shall! I will — forgive the pun — I will give you a little touch of nostalgia for a dead Bard, old honey tongued Shakespeare.

I shall take you through my life. I shall take you through my characters. I shall take you to the cleaners if you were foolish enough to pay the ticket prices. Above all, I shall take on a tour through my rough magic. And … vaudeville style music backing … there will be, I am happy to say, music, food for the gods. Jazz.

FELICITY

S/LACE: (Constantly shuffling papers, often dropping them and picking them up). It is obvious to me, a serious biographer with biographical pretensions and sundry matters accumulated and organised alphabetically … alphabetically …. (in fact her papers are a jumble) … that Francis Bacon … the contemporary essayist, writer … in fact and in person, not to mention deliberate intent … intent, I say, I have it somewhere under I … Bacon did in truth pen the works of William Shakespeare, probably in his copious spare time of which he had a very great deal due to the absence of the internet and social media.

HERMAN SCHWEINSTEIMMER: Indeed it is clear that Shakespeare was completely in tune with the Universal World Mind, and, that being a German concept, this therefore proves that Shakespeare was indeed German and only pretending to be English because that was where he was born and lived.

S/PEARE: Do you hear that, dear audience? Life. (He breathes in.) ‘Tis the air, the sound, of passing, ladies and gentlemen. Time. A gift to the living.

S/PEARE: We actors were never respectable. “Caterpillars of the Commonwealth”, the Puritan fathers called us. Crocodiles spreading immorality and vice, breeding lewdness and wickedness. We were celebrities, the immortals of our day!

MADAM PRE-POSTEROUS: I, Madame Preposterous, séance manager to the stars, ran into the Bard at a sitting only last week. At first I did not recognise him, but I quickly started up …

S/PEARE: Not again.

MADAME P: … a conversation and found out all I that needed to know. Our chat went exactly like this … (putting on a shawl covered in stars and moons) … and you are?

M/A: Dead.

S/PEARE: It is the facts that die. Swallowed up by the great leviathan, story.

HOWARD GIBBER: She had a son by him, who was Henry, the third Earl of Southampton. But then de Vere discovered that he was in fact the Queen’s son by an earlier lover. This meant he was the father of his own half-brother, the Queen’s son was her grandson, and sex education classes were definitely off the table. Very disturbing but, I think you will have to agree, innovative.

M/A: “Mr Shakespeare’s entrepreneurial philosophy was actioned in respect of a focus on the core value proposition taking into account the full competency set strategised into the actualisation of competitive differentiation across the synergistic portfolio of customer expectations going forward in a pro-active sense over time with an eye to the relevant rate of return benchmarks realised within the appropriate investment time frames having taken into account the full risk spectrum and spectrums, or spectra, of risk.

S/PEARE: I even see that you like to translate my works so that students can understand them better. So when I wrote this:

M/A: To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or take arms against a sea of trouble and by opposing end them.

S/PEARE: That excellent on-line assistant for all those skilful student plagiarists, “Sparksnotes’ No Fear Shakespeare”, brilliantly translates it as:

F/A: The question is: is it better to be alive or dead? Is it nobler to put up with all the nasty things that luck throws your way, or to fight against all those troubles by simply putting an end to them once and for all? I dunno, really.

S/PEARE: Popularity was never assured. For one thing, we had furious competition from bear baiting. The punters were very demanding:

Suggested visual. A playbill for “Hamlet”, perhaps at times in competition with a poster for bear-baiting.

1. BLATT: Dear, would you like to see the bear baiting or would you prefer to watch “Hamlet”, by William Shakespeare?

MRS. BLATT: What’s the difference, dear?

1. BLATT: Well, bear baiting involves the placing of a bear within arenas called bear-gardens which consist of a circular high fenced area, or pit. The bear is chained to a post by the leg or neck, and a number of well trained hunting dogs are set on it.

MRS. BLATT: Oooh, that sounds exciting, dear. And what is a Hamlet?

Mr. BLATT: A Hamlet is the story of the Prince of Denmark which investigates the deep paradoxes and contradictions of revenge within a moral universe that extends into a meditation on the nature of being and non-being within an eschatological framework.

MRS. BLATT: What?

S/PEARE: Goodnight to you too, darling Desdemona. What was … is … next for me? (He casts an anxious glance at the unstoppable, recurring clock. He is running out of time.) Age came ‘a creeping. The times darkened at the fading of Elizabeth’s sun. The little world of England became a pit of iniquity, all snottery and slime. I was still a master, but hastening to the end of my days. Fading and tottering. Yes, age is unnecessary.

S/PEARE: When we become time’s doting chronicles we cannot help but chronicle our own decline. Though now of course I am of an age for the ages: over 400 years and long since eaten by worms. But perhaps I am in a position to proffer some ghostly advice to you of the living.

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