By Natalie Ristovski
There is an age old adage – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it – and this could have been the mantra for my latest foray into the chaotically creative domain of the Sh!tfaced Shakespeare team for the 2025 Melbourne Comedy Festival, a good 12 months after my last one in the exact same theatre for, arguably, almost the exact same show, give or take a wholly different play.
The Melbourne Comedy Festival is always a mixed bag of cringe and delights. While some other forms of performing arts are decreed too ‘high brow’ (read: expensive, looking at you musical theatre) for mere mortals and some are very clearly still designed for the dregs of the wannabe US right-wing mouth-breathers (cough 80’s theatre restaurant cough), comedy remains somewhere in-between for most Australians. It’s usually an easy sell, it still being socially acceptable for blokey blokes to go and see comedians without someone assuming they’re gay, whipped, or any of the other moronic labels patriarchy places on men to keep them obedient and stuck in a lumberjack dudebro fantasy. “Yeah nah, it’s all good mate – I’m just taking the missus to see Funny McFuckface and you know he tells it like it is.”
Of course jokes on them, because everyone knows that to get into most festivals, all you have to do is fill out an application and pay the registration fee – which means as long as your show looks like it’s going to be on-brand, you can pretty much slap anything up there for the masses to consume, whether it falls under their narrow world-view of what’s comedy, or not.
Enter Shakespeare, of the Sh!tfaced variety, which is still one of the most cleverly packaged classic takes I’ve seen since Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (if you know, you know). The premise is in the title – a group of very talented actors performing one of the Bard’s plays, except one of the cast is drunk and determined to mess it up (read: improve it) for everyone else.
An evening with the Sh!tfaced Shakespeare crew hinges on your expectations going in, and a whole lot on the type of audience around you. Consummate masters of their craft, these professional players understand that a comedy show is only as good as the reaction that it gets from its crowd each night, which means a whole lot more work for those on stage and a whole lot of freedom for those off it. On the night in question, the dudebro ratio was high among us, and as with most encounters of these herds in the wild, they made sure that everyone was aware of their existence. The footy jokes flew, and flew, and flew, because the only way to shut up rabid hominids is to arbitrarily shout the names of sportsball teams out into the ether in a guttural growl, and hope your mating call resonates with the alpha of the pack. While this seemed to work for the most part, it did get tired and grating after the first five minutes – tis a fine balance between managing the masses and letting the lunatics take over the asylum, and there were a few moments that evening where it could have gone either way.
Despite the insurrection of fanatical cave-trolls, the show itself was quite enjoyable, with a Black Adder-esque feel in its quieter moments that allowed the wit and talent of the more sober players to take centre stage. Our “merry wanderer of the night” Puck was arguably one of the funnier actors of the evening, his dry and sardonic asides drawing appreciative laughter from those craving more than the usual dinner-theatre cuisine of sexual innuendos, cum jokes and footeeeee maaaaaate. A nod too for our fair Helena, who somehow managed to deliver her cavalcade of memorable monologues like a seasoned Shakespearean prima donna, while at the same time making a complete ass of herself onstage in the best ways possible.
Our soused entertainer for the night was Larrikin – sorry, Lysander – who looked like someone had kidnapped a guy wandering drunk out of the MCG, forced a costume onto him and shoved him onto the stage. Bursting all over the scene like an adolescent prepubescent seeing a naked woman for the first time, he blew his load a tad too early and loudly, his drunken antics turned up to eleven from the get-go, completely overshadowing his fellow cast-mates and giving him (and the show) nowhere much to go for the rest of the evening but down…onto the stage floor…which is where he inevitably ended up. The second half of his performance seemed better paced, the annoying younger brother sucking all the attention out of the room act was abandoned in favour of some choice in-jokes and call-backs, and a rather fabulous through-line with a moist shoe. This was where the actor’s actual talent and skill became more obvious, and where the show found its harmony as an ensemble piece.
The absurdity of trying to write a genuinely analytical and measured review of a comedy show where the goal is for someone to get drunk and screw it all up is not lost on me, but I am nevertheless compelled to praise the players in their pursuit of pandemonic precision. Once again, the cast and crew at Sh!tfaced Shakespeare achieved the almost unattainable, a show perfectly tailored to the crowd they were playing for, where most of the audience left feeling that they had “a fucken alright night” (an actual quote from one of the dudebros upon exiting). As for the rest of us, we could not help but admire and appreciate the fact that the actors managed to survive the experience at all, while also appearing to enjoy themselves the whole time.
That in itself is an achievement to be praised.
