Tragedy Has Never Been So Funny

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Four Shakespearean characters with an axe to grind hit Ealing

OPEN MIC @ THE GLOBE
Bored of the Bard, his dysfunctional characters are going for comedy - written and performed by Alex Dee, Mackenzie Taylor & Hils Barker.

"Richard III's got the hump. Katherine’s shrewed off. Hamlet’s lost his marbles. Ophelia's sinking fast. 400 years of being yawned at by sixth formers has finally got to them. Four dramatis personae have recast themselves… as stand-up comics.  

"Packing their corsets and codpieces, these fractured, posturing, sinister, self-obsessed, attention-craving egocentrics are forced to cope with the fractured, posturing, sinister, self-obsessed, attention-craving egocentric modern world."

Over the course of an hour of stand-up, celebrated comic actors Alex Dee, Mackenzie Taylor and Hils Barker give their final preview performance of Open Mic @ The Globe before taking the show to Edinburgh.

The comedy team Stage D’Or was formed in 2006 by Dee and Taylor, winner of the Joseph-Johnson award for creative writing, when they brought ‘Spite the Face’ and the hit show ‘The Phone Book Live!’ to the Fringe Festival. This year they have been joined by "multi-talented guitar playing comedian” (bbc.co.uk) Barker and Colman, who is 'finally realising his passion for the theatre'.

Ealing Today got a bit of background from Mackenzie Taylor before the big Ealing night and he was promising his best performance yet. "It's our last preview before we take it to Edinburgh so this has got to be as good as gets!" he quipped.

There wasn't much cause for nerves. "The reaction's been amazing so far," he said. "We've had a lot of people who love stand up and know nothing about Shakespeare - it appeals to everyone as it's cross genre. Then there was a bunch of English teachers in - they loved that it was taking Shakespeare and moving it on somewhere else. It works very well."

Mackenzie's background is in both acting and comedy. This show meshes the two. "I think this is a very different process from just doing stand up or acting," he explained. "This takes characters to places you never thought they'd go. It's almost like being a caricaturist - taking one feature and exaggerating it. You're taking a character onto a different level."

There are still tickets for tomorrow night's show at the Pen to Paper Comedy Club at the Finnegan Wake, so why not go and see if it's as you like it, or whether it's much ado about nothing...

Sorry!

July 23, 2007