Sh!t-faced Shakespeare®: Hamlet

Sh!t-faced Shakespeare: Hamlet is at heart Hamlet but with one major interruption: Hamlet's actor gets paralytically drunk before the audience have taken their seats. The premise is deliberately silly, and there is some good improvisation in the resulting chaos.

But, now in its 13th year, the whole thing feels oddly terse and expected. The Shakespeare is largely there as a framework for the drunken performance rather than something being seriously reworked, and once the gimmick is established there is not much more to discover in it. It is silly, certainly, but that is not quite enough on its own. The production has the unpredictable quality the format promises, but the underlying theatre has become tired and thin.

That said, there is still fun to be had, particularly when the improvisation catches fire, and clearly for its devotees, this is where it holds its value.