The Reduced Shakespeare Company has been going almost as long as Shakespeare himself. We asked one of the founders of the company, Reed Martin (far right), about how the company has sustained such a long career, what advice he has on adapting Shakespeare and why their new show is all about sport….
How long does it take you to get a show up and running?
It depends on the show, but usually about a year. We do six or eight drafts over six or eight months. Then we rehearse it for a month; then we workshop it. It changes at every stage. When we’re performing, things we thought were jokes turn out to just be sentences. Or things go wrong, and if we think that’s funny then we’ll try to recreate it. It’s sort of like the old music hall days, where an act would take their stuff on the road and just hone it and hone it.
Do you feel like the descendents of vaudeville?
In the US they call it Vaudeville Nouveau: it’s both smart and stupid, intellectual and scatological, verbal and physical.
What do you think was your big break?
It’s funny – I can’t look back and say there was one big break. There have been a lot of turning points. We loved the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. I remember standing on the Royal Mile, handing out leaflets in the rain, doing bits of the show in the street, all of us crammed into a studio apartment.
I suppose one thing I’d say is that work begets work. Even when you’re starting out and it doesn’t seem to be paying – you’re meeting people, you’re getting seen, you’re honing your show.
When did you start making your living from theatre?
The Reduced Shakespeare Company wasn’t a full-time job when I started. We really just did it for the love of it for the first 10 years. We started out as a ‘”pass-the-hat” busking act at festivals. During that time we developed our style: fast, funny, physical. When you’re busking you have to keep people’s attention and keep them there to the end, so they’ll throw you some money.
Busking is great in terms of interacting with audience and keeping a show fresh.
How do you think you’ve sustained such a long career in such a competitive industry?
From an economic point of view, we have low overheads. We don’t own a theatre, we have only one full-time employee; me and Austin Tichenor, who own the company, only get paid when we perform. We also create our own material, so we’re not dependent on someone else to come up with a show.
I don’t know why, exactly, but our material also seems to work all over the English-speaking world. We’ve toured to Ireland, Belgium, New Zealand, even Singapore and Hong Kong.
Do you have any advice on adapting Shakespeare?
Don’t be too reverent. We tend to make fun of all the pompousness around literature, but keep a respect for the text itself. We obviously know and respect Shakespeare’s plays, which is why Shakespeare scholars enjoy the show. We just want to point out the silliness of how seriously this stuff is taken.
Your latest show is all about sport. How do you go about researching such a broad subject?
We covered sport in three ways: a timeline of sport from the dawn of time to this very moment, sport across all seven continents, then finally we broke sports down into nine categories, like sports that go in a circle, who-can-beat-up-who sports, or mechanical sports.
What advice would you like to pass on to young performers?
My first acting teacher told me that if there is anything else that you think you would be happier doing, then you probably will be happier doing that. It is a very tough profession. But if this is the only thing that will make you happy, then go for it.
The Complete World of Sports (abridged) will be coming to the UK in June. For more details, visit the Reduced Shakespeare Company website.
Would you like to take your brand new show to The Underbelly at the Edinburgh Fringe festival? Then check out the New Voices Edinburgh brief.