Last week, Holly Williams interviewed Russell Kane about his blank verse comedy. Intrigued, she heads down to the Soho Theatre to check out the show...
Russell Kane’s first foray into playwrighting sees him taking on the big guns: as 'Fakespeare', he’s channelling the Bard by writing a contemporary comedy in iambic pentameter. This is explained to us in a little prologue – not delivered in blank verse just yet but with the stand up as himself, striding and skipping around the stage.
He tells us of the play’s origin: he gave a disastrous performance at an arts festival, when the ‘bag of McCains’ on his shoulder (he’s a working class bloke from Southend, and sounds like it) meant he crumbled before an elitist audience of private schoolboys and their teachers. But an insult from an audience member, informing him that Shakespeare knew how to write an insult, got him thinking: what if the whole of Essex was forced to speak like Shakespeare? Thus was Fakespeare born.
In the show proper, we have King Nigello, a banker broken by financial crisis, and his ditsy secretary and love interest Donna. Nigel’s going to top himself, before a final tempting but morally reprehensible offer sends him off-course. As Kane warns us, there’s no Shakespeare references here, no intertextual postmodern nudgery, but the whole thing is written in blank verse. And it’s not just witty pop culture references and banker jibes delivered in lines of five feet: Kane’s real skill is a recreation of a distinctly Shakespearean style. Puns and conceits are twisted over several lines, or batted back and forth with an impressive dexterity.
He has plenty of fun with words like ‘interest’, ‘investments’, ‘savings’ – playing on multiple banking, contemporary and archaic meanings. Modern references also get an old-fashioned rendering: characters can get ‘Daily Mail-ed’ and ‘Jeremy Kyle-ed’. There’s plenty of filth too, with saucy puns, double entrendre and plain old swearing. The plot is fairly basic but the show is driven by the clever linguistic displays, not the storyline.
So the writing is top notch. But other elements bring it down a bit – the low-key props (the crapness of which are jokingly acknowledged), probably worked in the play’s original Edinburgh context but feel a tad limiting here, while the lighting is all over the place. Kane is a stand up, not an actor, and although he certainly makes a decent fist of it, it would be intriguing to see the script performed by experienced professionals in a more polished setting.
The style is faintly shambolic, with ad-libbing and scrappy cues. Kane would no doubt argue this reflects the reality of Elizabethan theatre, and the audience certainly enjoy a bit of corpsing and improv. But it would be fascinating to see if Kane could take this project to the next level: Fakespeare only lasts 50 minutes, but a longer piece, with a fuller cast of characters played by experienced board-treaders and a more complicated plot, could be a real theatrical treat. Kane’s vaulting ambition has not o’erleaped itself just yet.
Russell Kane's Fakespeare is at the Soho Theatre from Tuesday the 9th to Saturday 13th March.
Click here to see all London Comedy.
Click here for things to do in London
Add an event
Lucian Freud exhibition opens today at the National Portrait Gallery
Amongst other things – the Olympics, the Jubilee, Damien Hirst – 2012 is the year of Lucian...