If, as one of the three actors behind The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare (Abridged) insists, the ghost of William Shakespeare is wholehearted in his approval of the hectic compression of all of his plays into a frenetic 97 minutes, he’s by no means alone. With a hey nonny nonny, Time Out enjoys a chat with a third of the of the show’s cast, Walter Lewis.

OK, so you’re starring in The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare (Abridged). What can we expect from this show?
Right, what you’ll get is a lot of laughs, some tears and maybe some urine on the seats. It’s 97 minutes and we cut out all the sex and violence and the things we didn’t understand, so that’s how we ended up with the running time. It’s great value for money – you get 37 plays for the price of one – it’s a big hootenanny.

How long have you been doing this show?
I’ve been with this show for over five years – I used to do it with the Reduced Shakespeare Company who originally wrote the show. Then another member of this company did a different production, so we’re doing a hybrid version of the RSC version and that version. It’s different productions of the same show.

It’s just the three of you on stage, cannoning through these 37 plays. It must be exhausting. How do you manage it?
It’s bewildering, chaotic and sometimes it’s ugly and gruesome. The secret is bananas. We eat lots and lots of bananas. For two reasons, mainly. One, for the potassium, one for the comedy potential. But people don’t see us do this, it’s all internal. You won’t actually see the bananas. If you come to the show wanting to see lots of bananas, you will be disappointed. You will feel the bananas through us.

Which parts of your production do you feel Shakespeare himself would have liked best?
Well, if he was here now, he’d definitely appreciate our take on Othello, which is done as a rap. No doubt he would have been a big MC himself if he had been alive now. He’d highly appreciate it. We all go crazy with the rapping.

Conversely, are there any moments you’d think would have him spinning in his grave?
I think he’s spinning in his grave with laughter. We’re always thinking of Bill when we do the show. We went to a medium in California a few years back, who contacted Shakespeare, and we know for a fact that he grooves on what we’re doing.

What did the medium say?
Well, there was a lot of ectoplasm, there was a lot of cosmic stuff going on and it was very difficult to comprehend. Generally, it was a thumbs-up. And he gave it in iambic pentameter, which was quite astounding.

This is monumental. What else did he say to you?
Well, he definitely said make the girls in the play real. At the moment I play most of the female parts. I have many dresses and wigs, enough to sustain my femininity.

A lot of people were put off Shakespeare at school. Do people end up getting ‘converted’ at your shows?
A lot of people, yeah. At least half the audience come wanting to hate us, because they disapprove of our approach to Shakespeare. The other half are similar to you in that they’re enjoying this new type of approach, because of their previous history with it. Ninety-nine per cent of the time, people will leave loving Shakespeare. The general love of Shakespeare is something that we foster and we make other people enjoy it through our experience. We are proud of that fact.

How much of a place is there left for more traditional types of productions?
There’s a place for any type of Shakespeare production, I think it’s all about drama, fun, the human experience – and with our productions it’s about bodily fluids too. That’s a little added extra you don’t get with the ordinary, more conservative production.

Have you ever sat through a really bad amateur production of a Shakespeare play and wanted to kill those responsible afterwards?
Mm. Yes we have. And we’ve killed 74 people in our time from extremely bad amateur productions. That’s one of our missions, to eradicate bad performances. That’s another sort of sideline that we do.

Shakespeare wrote some great put-downs and insults. What’s your favourite?
I think he compared someone to an infected toenail once. I like that one, it sticks in my mind.

The language of the original plays can be very dense and off–putting. Do you stick to it, or do you paraphrase it?
We stick to the original language and we paraphrase too. We mix it up. The sense is very important. Like I said, all the stuff we didn’t understand, we cut out – 37 plays, we only ended up with 97 minutes. More than likely, everyone who comes will understand what we’re on about. We’re not very smart people, so we got 97 minutes of maybe 5,000 minutes of plays.

Are you going to be doing this for the foreseeable future? Or do you have new plans?
As long as people pay us we’ll do it, absolutely, And there are other shows – there are The Reduced Bible, there’s The Complete History Of America show, there’s all the great books – there’s even the new Reduced Hollywood show. But doing the Shakespeare show was the first show devised in this way and it is something very close to my heart.

So if you could do any book at all – what would you choose?
I would say – certainly a Reduced Dr Seuss. I think that would be amazing. Take all those crazy stories and put them together and write them up as a sort of weird soap opera, sort of like a surreal EastEnders, something like that…

You could actually get the cast of EastEnders to star in it, too.
Mmm! There’s an idea there…

Timeout was talking to Walter Lewis star of 'The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)

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