MECHANICALS PUT ON A PLAY WITHOUT A PLAY

 

The Popular Mechanicals  would no doubt acknowledge a small debt of inspiration to that smart -alec Czech, Tom Stoppard, who took a couple of bit players from Hamlet and put their names up in lights. If pressed, they would even courteously bow to Rosencrantz and Guildernstern (though dead).

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The Popular Mechanicals have no need to defer to Stoppard. They can take credit for creating a new genre of theatre - the play without the play. And though it may be, from  time to to time, low brow, absurdist and occasionally poetical, their play is a true delight that will have you laughing from prologue to epilogue. The Popular Mechanicals are no less than those common tradesfolk Shakespeare summoned up to perform The Most Lamentable Comedy, and  Most Cruel Deaths of Pyramus and Thisbe at the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

 

The Mechanicals do in fact play out all their scenes from Shakespeare’s comedy and only depart from the text when the loquacious Bottom, cast as Pyramus, is hideously transformed into an ass while they are rehearsing in the woods. Although there have been some rib-tickling moments up until then, especially a prolonged scene cracking bottom jokes at the weaver’s expense, this is where the fun begins. A replacement must be found. Enter Ralph Mowldie, the once-great Shakespearean actor with a drinking problem. Although his arrival is an excuse for some indulgence in cloacal humour it is matched by some dazzling puppetry in the show-stealing, Chicken Galliard. 

Much of the delight in this piece comes from the characterisations of a uniformly brilliant cast brilliantly directed by Geoffrey Rush. Peter Rowley, braying and blustering, makes a meal of Bottom and Mowldie. Keith Robinson, gives Quince, the carpenter-turned-playwright and director, all the worst characteristics of a flouncing amateur. Tony Taylor is irresistible as the hapless Francis Flute, the bellows mender, who gets cast as a girl just when he’s got a beard coming on.

 

Gillian Hyde brings an incorrigible bird-like quality to Robin Starveling, the tailor. Paul Blackwell, toothless and pock-marked, nevertheless imbues Snug, the joiner, with an appealing simplicity. And in a triumph of stillness and concentration, Kerry Walker makes Tom Snout, the tinker, into a stolid mechanical indeed, with a fierce, earnest energy that is sometimes dour but never melancholic.The show abounds in songs and set pieces. There are frequent recourses to Shakespearean descriptions of dawn and dark. Quince gets to recite Henry V’s stirring call to arms before the battlements of Agincourt as the actors prepare to take the stage. For all its fun, like the Dream, the Popular Mechanicals also shows us a glimpse of that larger reality of of which this play is part, when Bottom returns to his ordinary consciousness with a faint memory of what happened under the spell.  There for a moment, standing in his crushed velvet pantaloons,  Peter Rowley brings the merriment to a reflective pause before the pageant dissolves into laughter and applause. This is the merriest of Christmas revels.

Bob Evans - Sydney Morning Herald,  June 20, 1987

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It's a family show (if you don't mind exposing them to the occasional F-bomb, copulating chickens and stage vomit) so bring the kids.  Mine compared it favourably to Horrible Histories and gave it the double thumbs up.

Jason Blake - Sydney Morning Herald,  April 11, 2017 

 

 

This would have to be one of THE FUNNIEST PIECES OF THEATRE I think I have ever seen.

The Australian
 

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The script is extremely funny, dipping in and out of the Shakespearean idiom, much as it does Shakespeare’s canonical text, yet achieves this without ever feeling inconsistent. The anachronisms of telephone calls and modern phrasing juxtaposed with a song about how awful it was to live in Tudor England all feel as part of the larger anarchic whole.

Jack Teiwes - Australia Stage Online, 9 April, 2017

 

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It will be many a year before you see theatre that is so original so downright and side splitting.
Sunday Telegraph

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You might need to check your more discerning tastes at the door, but once you do, this production is a hilarious ride. A hilarious, gassy, ride.

Paige Mulholland - AussieTheatre.com, 18 November, 2015

 

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I’ve been privileged to be at the best and most extraordinary theatre performances Sydney has had to offer, but none do I recall with such clarity and melting fondness as The Popular Mechanicals. To say I loved it is an understatement. It is silly, rude, clever, erudite, idiotic, painful, comical, really awful and quite brilliant.

Diana Simmonds  StageNoise April 9 2017  

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Some people will find it vulgar ,childish, impertinent, ill-informed and indulgent. In doing so they will miss out on a glorious and joyous entertainment.
The Daily Mirror  

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We don’t laugh at any of the Mechanicals’ suffering in and of itself. The Troupe’s hilarity comes from the fact that, despite the many  hopeless situations they face, they keep on. The script’s frenetic motion from failure to triumph and around again generates a warmth, vitality, which we have all seen before. It is the same life that surrounds any passionate undertaking, flanked by hope and chaos.

Max Dabta, Sydney University Drama Society - Pulp,  October 29, 2022 

 

 

One of the most rollickingly entertaining nights in the theatre.
Sydney Morning Herald

 

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THE PLAY AS AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE

Many of us were tortured in school by having to cold read a Shakespeare play aloud in class. How much we missed while dreading ‘our turn’. It caused mental anguish for those of us with dyslexia and sadly a deep reluctance to explore what we now know to be Will’s pure magic and profundity. This play might ease a hardened foot into a comfortable slipper.