All's Well That Ends As You Like It
by Michael Green
Greyfriars Kirk House, Edinburgh
About the play:
All’s Well That Ends As You Like It, by Michael Green is, as the name suggests, a Shakespeare parody. It is also a play for Coarse Actors. Michael Green coined the term “Coarse Acting” in the early 1970s — a coarse actor is someone “who can remember the lines but not the order in which they come.” Coarse Acting is now a recognized theatrical skill: it takes a company of highly-skilled and committed actors to master its delicate art. Alternatively, genuinely bad actors can be used. The fact that we sold out would suggest that Theatrical Theatrics Productions didn’t do the latter of these, but then again, maybe our large audiences were filled with people gratuitously laughing at how bad we were. Who knows?
Sell-out success is the most sought-after thing at the Fringe, and this beggars the question: how did we — a group of amateur school leavers — sell out in our first year? The play’s popularity was a large factor. The colourful way in which we flyered in full costume is another. But the main reason is undoubtedly that we were fresh faces at an ageing Fringe, intent on ridiculing everything that the theatrical world holds dear — but above all, Shakespeare. It is for this reason — that we were, to put it bluntly, taking the piss — that one reviewer noted, “This is what the Fringe is all about.”
The play itself had our audiences in hysterics for the entire run. From the mindless, pointless set change (two identical trees being swapped for one another), to the duke falling off his throne, to the Coarse Actor’s frequent costume changes and missed cues, to the painfully unfunny nature of the Clown’s incessant jokes (“Fart. Horn. Cuckold!”), All‘s Well That Ends As You Like It was a guaranteed crowd-pleaser from the first. Slapstick tickles everyone at some level, and the play had slapstick in abundance. Yet it also had more subtle, Shakespearean jokes for the RSC connoisseur. With obvious references to Lear, Othello, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, A Winter’s Tale and more oblique textual references to practically every play in the Shakespearean canon, Michael Green provided a dream come true to the avid Shakespeare fan. And, of course, the clichés! The pastoral scene where nothing happened. The storm scene. The girl dressed up as a boy. The actor playing many parts. All’s Well That Ends As You Like It was not only a lot of fun, it was an intelligent critique of how Shakespeare is played in theatres up and down the country. And yes, the clichés here were deliberate!
