Platform Magazine

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)… one more time

All the world’s a stage. We all have our exits and our entrances. Cornelis Krottje, Kees de Vries and Tom Wilcox certainly had many of these, since they acted out all the parts in Shakespeare’s plays. On top of that, they had the tough job of staging The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) in about an hour and a half. After all, the comedies alone consist of ‘three good jokes distilled into 16 plays!’

I spoke to Tom and Cees about authenticity, the movie they created especially for the play, to be funny or not to be funny, improvisation, and the toy dinosaur.

The Complete Works started off with Cees, having a bachelor’s degree from the University of Franeker, proudly yet erroneously presenting the audience with the Frisian bard Gysbert Japiks. When I ask Cees about how he came up with Japiks of all people, he smiles and tells me that he came up with this during rehearsal. Japiks is a Frisian poet, one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, together with a university that no longer exists, and therefore untraceable, it would certainly draw people’s attention and would therefore work quite nicely; why not keep it then? As a fellow Frisian, it certainly drew my attention.

Cees had only just started his speech on Gysbert Japiks when he was interrupted. This night was not going to be about Japiks, it was going to be about Shakespeare.

Luckily, Tom had prepared a presentation on Shakespeare. He provided the audience with some historical background information. At a fast pace, he read the important dates and events from Shakespeare’s lifetime using cue cards. Some of the information may have been new to the audience. For instance, who ever knew that Shakespeare invaded Poland?

The Complete Works, like most plays do, follows a script. Most plays are staged according to the script, and the actors stick to their lines. The history bits from Tom’s presentation, for instance, were in the original script, and so were the speeches from Shakespeare’s plays. Tom, Cees and Kees, who have been acting in many plays together for about four years now, did not always stick to their original lines: they also changed and improvised certain parts. They not only came up with jokes during rehearsals, but on stage as well. This way, each performance was slightly different. During our talk, they explain to me that many jokes they used are in the script. Some were not that funny, or just old. In the script they had in 1999 (this year’s performance of The Complete Works was not their first), which was already old at the time, there were some jokes that were outdated. There was the instance that Juliet started feeling sick because of the poison she had taken. Juliet’s line was: ‘I feel like George Bush (Sr.) in Japan.’ No audience members would get that, because it did not refer to a recent event. There is, however, an efficient way to fix the problem of old jokes gone stale: improvisation.

In a serious play, improvisation would be scary, but in this one it works as long as it’s funny. Improvisation does not ruin the plot. There is no need to visualize the pages of the script, and Cees and Tom often felt like they were just ‘stumbling through’ the different parts of the play, changing things slightly every time. It does not really matter how they say things, as long as it is funny. It’s not as if when someone does not mention a certain line, it ruins the entire plot.

When I ask Tom about the improvisation sessions he and his fellow actors take part in, he tells me that he has learned a lot from these, and that improvisation is a great warm-up. When I hear him say this, I think of him and Kees stretching and jumping around like a couple of athletes, like they did at the beginning of the play. The play is like an extensive improvisation session! Upon asking for tips for aspiring actors, Cees tells me that, when improvising, one should not try to make things funny, this is something that just happens. If you manage to draw away your attention from having to be funny, then you don’t have to worry about it.

When I ask him about the movie they showed halfway through their performance, Cees explains to me that a script is usually funnier to act than to read. This was especially the case with the comedies, which Cees, Tom, and Kees decided to turn into a movie. For the audience, it was better to see the part containing Shakespeare’s comedies acted out than to simply hear the actors say the lines. This way, the story would be visually interesting and funny to those who had not read most of Shakespeare’s plays (like themselves). The movie, with the wonderfully eloquent title of ‘The Comedy of Two Well-Measured Gentlemen of Verona Lost in the Merry Wives of Venice on a Midsummer’s Twelfth Night in Winter’, or Kees’s equally long alternative, or Tom’s alternative title; ‘The Loveboat Goes to Verona’, did what it was supposed to do: the audience had quite a few laughs about Shakespeare’s comedies, which were depicted rapidly for the sake of saving time. Performing all of Shakespeare’s plays within an hour and a half is not an easy task…

The toy dinosaur in Troilus and Cressida is a curious thing. I ask Tom and Cees if that was in the original script. Tom tells me that it was! Apparently, it was a walking Godzilla that would roar. Very Cloverfield meets Transformers, as I heard Cees say during the performance I saw just a few weeks ago. During the opening scene of Troilus and Cressida, Tom’s character comes in and does something completely ridiculous that has nothing to do with the play. Tom explains that during rehearsals, he would just pick up a random prop and do something silly. Kees de Vries’s brother owned the dinosaur, so Kees brought it over. There is no ‘stop’ button on it, so once switched on, the dinosaur would just keep roaring, adding to the fun.

Besides the dinosaur, there are many more ways to perform Shakespeare plays in a creative and alternative way. The histories, for instance, were all part of a football match. Ironically, this game resembles the way the crown was passed on in Shakespeare’s plays, and throughout English history. It got crazy at times, like Richard III, willing to trade a kingdom for a horse.

The last of Shakespeare’s plays to be tackled in The Complete Works was the longest one: Hamlet. It was to be performed by means of a workshop based on Freud’s theories on psychoanalysis. When I bring up the workshop, Cees finishes my sentence: ‘The workshop was… utter nonsense.’ For the workshop, the actors divided the audience into three parts: the id (the first two rows waving their hands above their heads while chanting “maybe, maybe not”), the ego (a guy running around on stage), and the super-ego (for which part of the audience was divided into three sections; the masculine portion, the voice of vanity, and the modern context).  At the very end of the workshop, the girl who had been called on stage to represent Ophelia was supposed to scream. It happened once that she did not. This was funny, and Cees, Tom and Kees had to improvise their way to the last part of their play: the shorter versions of Hamlet, and finally, Hamlet backwards. This is a funny way of pointing out that you know Hamlet backwards and forwards…

I had a great time watching Cees, Tom and Kees performing, and interviewing them. For those who have missed the previous performances, or those who cannot get enough of it, or those who wish to see the toy dinosaur; Cees, Tom and Kees will be performing The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Abridged ‘one more time’ (yeah, right…) at the USVA’s OUTheatre (former Universiteitstheater) on Thursday 8 and Friday 9 January 2009.