Over the last few years, I have gotten smashed with some fairly interesting people in some fairly interesting places. But never before have I got shitfaced – a technical term – with people whose professional obligation was getting tanked up before me. This is the premise of Shitfaced Shakespeare, a show in which one member of the (professionally trained!) cast is chosen to spend four hours drinking before performing a Shakespeare play while their sober colleagues try to stop them from destroying the Bard’s work.
This is Shakespeare as Shakespeare intended it
Currently, the company is performing Romeo and Juliet in London before touring the UK. I joined the cast for their ‘drink up’ on Saturday, arriving at the Leicester Square Theatre a few hours before the curtain went up. Most of the cast were sat on stage. Charlie, that evening’s drunk designate, was already pounding back a large glass of wine. They were in the middle of a card game called ‘Shithead’, which they play ‘religiously’, before moving on to a board game called Secret Hitler, which was actually banned in an East London commune I lived in a few years ago.
Each actor has a different regimen for their turn to get drunk. Josh, playing Tybalt and Lord Capulet that evening, told me that when he first started, he would drink whiskey and listen to an eleven-minute megamix of Five, the late-90s boy band, to get in the zone. Charlie, playing the roles of Mercutio and Friar Laurence, has changed his routine over his four years. He started out with six pints of Guinness and a bottle of prosecco. Shockingly, he discovered that combination made him feel quite ill, so he replaced them with two-thirds of a bottle of spiced rum, paired with Coca-Cola. But he then scrapped these too as they ‘felt too much like work’ when he them drank on nights out.
During my visit, his pre-show set-up included a bottle of white wine, two small cans of lager and several large tequila limes packed with chillies. Steph, playing Juliet, chopped and prepared these onstage. There weren’t quite enough chillies to make a properly spicy margarita, but they did a decent job of masking the taste of the tequila, which Charlie hates. One of the cast members explained that despite him not liking it, it was the only alcohol that wasn’t a depressant. I’m no scientist, but if you give me enough of any spirit, I’m happy enough.
Once he was a few spicy tequila limes deep, he took me to the back of the theatre to a grimy alley where the smokers of the cast indulge. The dirty off-white back wall of the Prince Charles Cinema stared back at me, and the Church of Notre Dame de France’s glass windows shone down. The smell of Chinatown masked whatever the alley actually ponged of. Each of the buildings had mysterious rivers of liquid seeping out that combined with the theatre’s air-conditioning leakage to create what was described to me as ‘the pool of despair’.
After a couple of hours of imbibing, I retreated to the audience. While most of the cast then delivered a faithful and entertaining rendition of the tragedy, Charlie got up to whatever he pleased, despite their best efforts to contain him. The play had the audience laughing throughout, culminating in the marriage of Romeo to Lord Capulet, following a particularly funny threesome involving Romeo, Juliet and Friar Laurence.
After the show, there is a very strict rule that for an hour the drunk can only drink water. As we retreated to the bar below the theatre for a couple of post-performance Scooby brews, I did wonder if Charlie would break this rule. But it was heavily policed by Steph, who had been chopping chillies into his tequila earlier. The poacher turned gamekeeper, a tale as old as time.
Despite what some po-faced theatre critics may have told you, this is Shakespeare as Shakespeare intended it. All throughout Shakespeare’s life, there were serious issues with water supplies, so most lowly actors performing plays like Romeo and Juliet would’ve been sipping ale throughout the day. It’s a sign of the degradation of our arts that the Shitfaced Shakespeare gang are unusual in putting a few tins away pre-performance. Perhaps it was the beer goggles, but I had a great evening. It could only have been better if they had all been drunk.
Comments