3 actors, 38 plays and 100 characters Challenge accepted

Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a group of rogue IT victims who find their release in theatre, summoned us commoners to Lamakaan last weekend for their play the ‘CmpltWrks of WllmShkspr Abridged’. Basically, they portrayed all the 38 plays of Shakespeare in two hours and how!

Three actors- Srikanth, Utkarsh and Riyaz, 38 plays and about a hundred characters; if that wasn’t enough, in came thunderstorm, lighting and rain which forced them to shift the play from open air to a claustrophobic balcony. But it was as if the Chamberlain’s Men were in Barney Stinson mode, saying “challenge accepted”, to everything that came their way.

What followed was a rollercoaster ride of absolute mayhem and massacre of Shakespeare’s literary works in the most hilarious way possible. The audience could not stop laughing and the actors could not stop feeding off them. The highlight of this two hours long craziness was when the actors on stage decided that it was too much for them to simultaneously play all the characters and started involving the audience members.

People were called on stage, asked to run around and scream while the rest of the audience was asked to participate in a cacophony of sounds which made zero sense. The entire experience was so bizarre that it would be a shame if I had to reveal it all here. It was pretty apparent that the constraint of a narrow balcony was taking a toll on the performance. Movements were restricted, especially when the play demanded that the actors break into a crazy fit-like routine every ten minutes.

What they lacked in space, they made up in energy and spirit. Once they reached the last play ‘Hamlet’, they did the entire routine over and over again, each time doing it a bit faster than the previous time. Just when you thought that it was over they got up and did it all over again in reverse.

No matter what I say about it, the craziness that took over the Lamakaan balcony while Shakespeare himself wept from the heaven, cannot be trapped in mere words. The thees, thys and Thous were raining heavier than the clouds and in the most absurd places. It is probably the only time you would not mind your favourite Shakespearean plays being molested the way they were.

The team of actors was well supported by the backstage and the tech crew. The music cues came bang on time and the backstage crew were always ready with the myriad props that the actors needed every other second. The only thing that was amiss was the occasional mistiming of Utkarsh’s dialogues.

He forgot his lines and fumbled quite frequently, and most of the times they were the punch lines, which kept killing the joke. Having said that, be it the Lamakaan balcony, the stage or any other place, if you miss the next time His Lordship’s men come calling, well, it’s on you.

By:Saharssh