Brevity is the Soul of Wit – Reducing Shakespeare in the 21st Century

By Matt Wolf.

Mention the acronym RSC and your mind might turn to the venerated Royal Shakespeare Company, Britain’s long-established classical theatre company. But there’s an entirely separate troupe with the same initials that has found its own time-honored perch in the UK, and elsewhere, too.

That would be the Reduced Shakespeare Company, which distills the Bard’s 37 plays into a whistlestop tour through the canon in a way that is knockabout and irreverent, yes, but smart and cunning with it.

You want Hamlet told backwards? You got it, along with the carnivorous Titus Andronicus reimagined as a YouTube cooking tutorial. The complex, interwoven history plays prompt a bustling football game with a crown kicked from one king to another, while the comedies allow ample recourse to fairies and spells and shipwrecks and rings: the component parts of some of the most cheering works ever written.

“People just love Shakespeare’s stories and his characters and anything that celebrates Shakespeare,” says Adam Long, a Californian ex-pat who has made London his home for the past thirty-five years. Long helped birth the Complete Works in his home state some 45 years ago before bringing it to the Edinburgh Festival in 1987. From there, a long UK life for the production followed – nine years in the West End included. (Along the way, Long settled in the UK and has a wife and two grown-up children.)

As this alternate RSC brand took hold, other topics were added to the highly compressed theatrical mix, including the Bible and America itself. But it’s Shakespeare who has provided the overwhelmingly mighty throughline. That’s quite something, says Long, whose own history with Shakespearean performance dates back to playing Moth in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and a secretary to Polonius in Hamlet, both at the California Shakespeare Festival in the San Joaquin Valley when he was eighteen years old.

And now the show is getting a reboot, reimagined for 2026. Long remains as director and co-writer of this version featuring a tireless cast of three, which kicks off mid-February at The Theatre Chipping Norton before embarking on a thirty-venue UK tour.

And though times have changed in the decades since Long and two fellow Californians launched their RSC, the impetus, he says, remains the same: “The show is something that spontaneously happens onstage in front of an audience, stemming from the creativity and imagination of the three actors on view, and I’m incredibly excited about the actors we’ve got – they’re incredibly smart and funny.” He points to the 2400 applicants for roles as proof of an appetite for the Bard that surpasses expectation. “Is that crazy or what? We’re tapping into the underbelly of Bard fanatics.”

Amongst them is current company member Efé Agwele, a lively and passionate 27 year-old who first got her enthusiasm for the task at hand from her mother: “She knows Shakespeare – you sit her down and she can tell you the whole plot of Romeo and Juliet like no one else in the world.”

Trained at Mountview drama school, Agwele sees The Complete Works as an opportunity to spread the Shakespearean word. “People need joy at the moment. It so happens we have this universal icon, William Shakespeare, and we are bringing him to the people. That is what the arts are for.”

Before graduating in 2021, Agwele appeared as a Nigerian-accented Messenger in Richard III. Now she gets to pay at least passing acquaintance to all of Shakespeare’s plays. Agwele’s sections of the purposefully fast, fleet show include the celebrated Hamlet-in-reverse, the title role in Macbeth and a glorious amalgam of other roles that were still being divvied up amongst the performers at the time of our conversation.

As one who belongs to the short-form era of TikTok and Insta, Agwele credits Long and his writing colleagues Daniel Singer and Jess Winfield for tapping into the zeitgeist now, as well as then.

“We live in an age of ‘tell me everything in the short form’ and people wanting to know everything in as little time as possible,” so what better, more relevant way,  Agwele says, than to dial up the Bard sharp and fast: “Watch some Shakespeare and head home in time,” she laughs, “for a new episode of The Traitors.”

There does of course remain the question of why this show now, a question which has been very much on the mind of this version’s co-producer, John Terry, who also runs the 225-seat Cotswolds venue in Chipping Norton where the tour is starting. (This is by some measure their largest tour yet.)

Back in the day, Terry points out, interest in the piece lay in watching the “radical, almost uncouth approach of three Californians in baseball boots having a go at Shakespeare.” Now, he says, there’s a separate attraction that comes from widening out the casting remit. Agwele’s stage colleagues include the London-based Korean performer Woogie Yung, and an English actor, Tom Pavey, who is coupling this tour with an Oxford University PhD about anthropogenic climate change on lions over time. “We met a huge range of performers,” notes Terry, “and the three best were wonderfully different from each other – and from the original cast.”

“There’s a tension between the characters onstage and the work they are trying to present,” observes Terry, which has in turn led to “the wonderful energy” that sealed the deal on the current casting. “These are three comically brilliant outsiders who don’t immediately come across as the people you might expect to talk you through Shakespeare.”

It helps, too, that the agreeably larky nature of the enterprise conjoins cheekiness with intelligence whilst reclaiming canonical titles and genres for keeps. But what makes it all work, of course, is the lasting foundation provided by the company’s namesake. “The genius of Shakespeare comes through no matter how crazy the show goes with it,” says Terry. “As Jon Stewart’s Daily Show once said about The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ‘If you like Shakespeare, you’ll love this show. If you hate Shakespeare, you’ll love this show!’” The result in every way offers something for everyone: a broad-based appeal that Shakespeare understood best of all. 

The Complete Works of Shakespeare (abridged) plays at TBTL from Tuesday 16 – Thursday 18 June. Click here for tickets and more info.

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Matt Wolf is an American theatre critic and journalist who has been based in London since 1983.