The Play's the Thing: Holly Williams talks to Edinburgh Award nominee Russell Kane about his blank verse comedy.
Russell Kane has come over a bit Elizabethan. His show Fakespeare, which comes to London as part of a nationwide tour following a sell-out run at the Edinburgh fringe, is a theatrical sidestep from his usual stand-up. Kane turns the idea of modernising Shakespeare on its head – instead of giving us A Midsummer Night’s Dream set in a bus station in Essex with a fairy host of chavs, he tells the story of Nigel, a banker from Southend, but verily in the style of the bard. Kane’s tale of modern Britain is delivered in iambic pentameter and archaic language, although there are still plenty of pop culture, celeb-riddled references declaimed in finest thesp mode by Kane and his cast.
Kane has long been recognisable as a comedian with brains behind the funnies, but just where did the idea for an Elizabethan satire on modern life come from? “It started with a stand-up routine weirdly enough – I’m not sure how many plays come out of comedy shows,” explains Kane. He was booked as the light relief at a Shakespeare festival, and it didn’t go too well. Some highbrow heckling pompously suggested that he ought to look to Shakespeare, that ‘the bard knew how to write a joke.’
Kane took the suggestion perhaps more literally than it was intended: he’s taken the ‘how’ and applied it to his own contemporary comedy, to make a Shakespearean-style, blank verse comedy for our times. You might have thought writing in that strict form would prove tricky, but it seems Kane was a natural. “I didn’t know I could do this stuff at will – but it really started coming out, I really enjoyed doing it,” he explains, adding that he’s no Shakespeare scholar: “I did English at uni but I focused on Victorian stuff, so I’ve only got the same understanding of Shakespeare as other people.” That said, Fakespeare has maybe been brewing for a while – Kane recalls “going through a phase, when I was about 19 or 20, of going to see Shakespeare plays by myself.”
When it comes to the constriction of the iambic pentameter, Kane insists it’s actually a help when writing. “With comedy, as soon as you apply strict parameters, the more – paradoxically – liberating they are. So if you put people in a room and say you’ve got to come up with something about Robert Mugabe and Waitrose, you’ll get something great; if you say it can be about anything, you’ll get the usual studenty stuff about badgers and jam. The Elizabethan playwrights were masters of the constrained form – it’s partly because it actually makes it easier to learn the lines, that te-tum-te-tum-te-tum-te-tum-te-tum rhythm.”
The unfamiliar form applied to familiar situations also helps the humour. “There’s something about estranging ourselves from our culture – you jump outside and take a look at yourself, which is what all art should make you do,” suggests Kane.
But while Fakespeare is funny, it’s definitely a theatrical performance, not a stand-up show. “It’s been listed in the theatre sections, so people usually know what they’re coming to unless they just googled my name and didn’t read about the show, in which case they’re probably too thick to get it anyway,” says Kane. “We’ve been performing in theatres, and some have been terrifyingly huge – we were in a 700 hundred seater last night. But you can’t do it anywhere too small; it fits a proper stage, like at the RSC.”
The RSC? Oh yeah. Kane and his company were invited to perform Fakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon, home of the Royal Shakespeare Company – a fact his 19-year-old, play-going self would surely have been blown away by.
Kane himself, although a skilled performer both verbally and physically (his stand up includes much prancing around the stage anyway), had never thought he could act. When I asked what acting he’d done before, he says ‘nothing’, before admitting that “I was an extra in Grange Hill when I was a kid”. He explained that somehow he managed to get over his nerves when it came to stand-up, but despite having written Fakespeare, wasn’t at all sure he could act it. But a bit of one-on-one coaching sorted him out: “My partner sent me to her friend who is an acting coach, and just the two of us had a go at it. I thought I’d be silly, but it just came out of me – it’s really satisfying stuff to act.”
His stand up has often looked at his working class parents and the gap between their interests and his own (memorably, his dad shouting at him that he "better not be reading Penguin Classics" up in his room) – but surely any parent would be proud at their kid penning their own Shakespeare play? “Yeah, my mum finds it hilarious”, says Kane. Part of her enjoyment might be due to the fact that it’s fiction – she and other family members don’t appear. “The show last year was harder, knowing because it was more about me. It’s a bit awkward having her watching me do a masturbation sketch about my Nan.” Nice. Still, Shakespeare can be filthy at times, a quality you can surely still expect to find in Kane’s Fakespeare. Proving popular with Shakespeare buffs and comedy fans alike, it seems Kane has got a lot to be thankful to that heckler for.
Russell Kane's Fakespeare is at the Soho Theatre from Tuesday the 9th to Saturday 13th March.
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