Over the last few years, I have gotten smashed with some fairly interesting people in some fairly interesting places. But never before have I got shitfaced – a technical term – with people whose professional obligation was getting tanked up before me. This is the premise of Shitfaced Shakespeare, a show in which one member of the (professionally trained!) cast is chosen to spend four hours drinking before performing a Shakespeare play while their sober colleagues try to stop them from destroying the Bard’s work.
This is Shakespeare as Shakespeare intended it
Currently, the company is performing Romeo and Juliet in London before touring the UK. I joined the cast for their ‘drink up’ on Saturday, arriving at the Leicester Square Theatre a few hours before the curtain went up. Most of the cast were sat on stage. Charlie, that evening’s drunk designate, was already pounding back a large glass of wine. They were in the middle of a card game called ‘Shithead’, which they play ‘religiously’, before moving on to a board game called Secret Hitler, which was actually banned in an East London commune I lived in a few years ago.
Each actor has a different regimen for their turn to get drunk. Josh, playing Tybalt and Lord Capulet that evening, told me that when he first started, he would drink whiskey and listen to an eleven-minute megamix of Five, the late-90s boy band, to get in the zone. Charlie, playing the roles of Mercutio and Friar Laurence, has changed his routine over his four years. He started out with six pints of Guinness and a bottle of prosecco. Shockingly, he discovered that combination made him feel quite ill, so he replaced them with two-thirds of a bottle of spiced rum, paired with Coca-Cola. But he then scrapped these too as they ‘felt too much like work’ when he them drank on nights out.
