Review: Mayfest: The Complete Deaths

How would a troupe of anarchic contemporary clowns and a celebrated playwright/director with three brains go about setting themselves a real (Shakespearean) theatrical challenge?

Well, they could have done a comic opera staring a blind old man with three daughters set in a wind tunnel, or lost a dysfunctional Danish family in the labyrinthine tunnels of a haunted house at a fairground, or got a seemingly ordinary and unambitious Scottish couple to win the Highland Games by resorting to some unexpected back-stabbing.

But this would all have been too obvious and easy…

So instead, Spymonkey and Tim Crouch (for it is they) decide to stage all 75 of the deaths featured in Shakespeare’s oeuvre – but only the ones that happen on stage, because Tim Crouch is a man who believes in imposing (some!) limitations. So: no Ophelia (even though Spymonkey’s Petra and the audience are gagging for it), not Lady Macbeth, Duncan or Mercutio – although we do get a great Polonius, thanks to the arras providing not only a thin veil between the worlds of on and off, but also a thinly-veiled clue as to where Hamlet’s inner clown might have thrust his rapier.

And then there’s the fly that’s killed in Titus Andronicus (which along with the 14 other deaths contained therein must surely make it Top of the Pop-Offs?), and which becomes something of a film star in the show. It’s a nasty, dirty fly and it’s made to do very wrong things in the schoolboy hands of the baddest of monkeys, Stephan Kreiss, which we can see in glorious close-up.

Most of the routines in the show come off brilliantly – and a few less so, but that’s showbiz for you. There’s a wonderful sequence of cod expressive contemporary dance, a stupid huge cod codpiece worn by Spymonkey’s Aitor Basauri (“I’m not fat. I just look fat”), a hilarious projection of the animated Bard berating Aitor, and some deceptively easy-looking physical shenanigans from Stephan, Petra and Aitor.

Toby Park is charged with playing Tim ‘the director’, Crouch’s sulky, demanding, comedy alter-ego – a device that neatly captures the obvious though self-imposed ‘artistic differences’ between the intellectualism of Crouch and the anti-intellectualism of Spymonkey. Their love of mocking all things intellectual can best be seen in Toby Park’s deadpan prologue of Love Room, a Jean-Paul Sartre spoof and one of the funniest and filthiest bits of Spymonkey work to date.

“Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown”, one imagines: in this case, the director’s head, trying to contain the remit and keep in line an unruly bunch of clowns who just want to blow bubbles and waggle their arrases. Still, it’s a joy to see these superclowns on the BOV stage at last (especially so soon after Peepolykus’ Massive Tragedy of Madame Bovary), and another feather in MAYK’s cap for bringing them to this year’s Mayfest.

The Complete Deaths was at Bristol Old Vic as part of Mayfest 2016, which finishes on Sunday, May 22. For more info and to book tickets, visit www.mayfestbristol.co.uk/mayfest2016