‘If there is one, I shall make two in the company’: Creation Theatre’s The Merry Wives of WhatsApp / Horatio! and Hamlet
After collaborating with Big Telly Productions on The Tempest and Alice: A Virtual Theme Park, two of the most expansive virtual theatre productions seen during lockdown, Creation Theatre have spent September bringing to life a brace of Shakespearean two-handers. Whilst both were certainly smaller productions, they were no less engaging in their exploration of performing Shakespeare in lockdown.
During the first week in September, Creation brought us The Merry Wives of WhatsApp, directed by Natasha Rickman and written by and starring Olivia Mace and Lizzie Hopley. Swapping ‘Windsor’ for ‘WhatsApp’ in the title nods to the production’s contemporary lockdown setting: adapted into a two-hander, the story largely plays out through a series of video calls between two middle-class suburbanites Alice Page (Mace) and Meg Ford (Hopley). The opening scene, for example, took place as Meg got her children ready for homeschooling, whilst Alice lounged in bed considerably worse for wear after a Zoom party the night before. Everything from face masks to Joe Wicks P.E. got a mention; but perhaps most apt of all was the strange sense of unfixedness in time. WhatsApp seemingly took place simultaneously across several different phases of the UK’s time in lockdown all at once — 2020’s sense of elasticity and meaninglessness of time ingrained in the fabric of Mace and Hopley’s Shakespearean update.
As a two-hander, Merry Wives characters were alluded to in WhatsApp by Page and Ford, but were never seen — perhaps surprisingly including the star of Shakespeare’s original, Sir John Falstaff. It was arguably a gamble, but one which undoubtedly paid off: Mace and Hopley immediately crafted through their performances the sense of two believeable and likeable characters who know each other well, the chemistry between the actresses firmly underpinning everything else. Rickman’s direction was also continuously strong, with the production shifting between live performances on Zoom and the occasional pre-recorded segments well.
Merry Wives can be considered Shakespeare’s Falstaff spin-off — The Green, Green Grass to the Henriad’s Only Fools and Horses, if you will — and the sitcom comparison feels particularly apt here. I detected strong influences of classic British comedy from the likes of Victoria Wood and Marks & Gran in Mace and Hopley’s updating of the play’s story and language. The sitcom aesthetic in some ways felt reminiscent of Fiona Laird’s 2018 production of Merry Wives for the RSC. However, that production’s TOWIE-influenced aesthetic and vintage sitcom vibe lent the play a ‘ugly political undercurrent’¹ — a tone not dissimilar to the recent stage version of BBC sitcom Upstart Crow, about which Gemma noted that ‘[Ben] Elton’s jokes [felt] out of place, outdated and cheap — perhaps more suited to a 1970s TV sitcom’.
In contrast, Rickman’s WhatsApp felt firmly rooted in 2020 not just through its lockdown setting, but also in its engagement with play’s potentially problematic elements. Falstaff was seen by Page and Ford as an unwanted deviant refusing to enter (or perhaps oblivious to) the post-#MeToo era of 2020. Falstaff’s amorous letters were updated to the knight sexting both women identical messages — complete with an aubergine emoji just in case his proposition wasn’t clear. The fact that Falstaff was never seen in this production lent his actions an additional uncomfortableness, aligning him with the all-too-familiar ‘internet man’ sliding into a woman’s DM’s with unwanted sexual advances. This reframing ultimately placed the power further into the hands of Page and Ford, however, alongside their cohort of ‘Merry Wives’ — the audience members themselves — recruited to put a misogynistic dinosaur firmly, and deservedly, in his place.
Where Mace and Hopley’s play attempted to update and retell the entirety of Merry Wives within its 2020 setting, Creation’s second two-hander of the month — Horatio! and Hamlet — pared Shakespeare’s tragedy down much further. While there were recognisable scenes from Hamlet throughout Horatio!, writer Nicholas Osmond never attempted to retell Shakespeare’s play. Instead, his play centred around the high concept of dropping Hamlet (Ryan Duncan) into the global pandemic, having the character speak almost entirely using lines and speeches from Hamlet. Opposite Hamlet, Osmond’s Horatio spoke mostly in modern English, becoming both a modernised version of Shakespeare’s character and a fourth-wall-breaking commentator on Hamlet’s angsty verbosity.
If WhatsApp felt like a sixty-minute sitcom episode, then Horatio! played out more like an extended comedy sketch — happening in real time, and taking place as a Zoom call between the two characters similar to Mace and Hopley’s approach. Again, the performances of the two actors underpinned everything else: Duncan’s melodramatic spoilt rich kid found the right balance between amusing and annoying, and Osmond’s comic timing and barely contained exasperation made Horatio consistently likeable, authentic and genuinely funny.
Horatio! juxtaposed Hamlet’s early modern verse with Horatio’s throwaway responses, drawing humour from the culture clash with regular laugh-out-loud exchanges. ‘O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams’ (Hamlet, 2.2.273–275) laments Hamlet at one point; ‘You’ve not been enjoying lockdown, then?’, Horatio nonchalantly asked in reply. At another, Horatio muted the ‘To be, or not to be’ speech of Act 3 Scene 1 to ask the audience, ‘Did you ever have a friend who you realised was actually a bit of a nob?’. As with Falstaff’s sidelining in WhatsApp, Osmond regularly pushed Hamlet into the background to offer a postmodern critique of a character who seems to have fallen out of favour with audiences and scholars alike in recent years. However, whilst he offered a timely snapshot of how Hamlet is apparently often viewed in 2020, Osmond did so in a lighthearted fashion rather than engaging in an in-depth critique. As with other lockdown Shakespeare productions, the emphasis was squarely on humour rather than unpicking the text’s potentially more contentious elements.
Looking at The Merry Wives of WhatsApp and Horatio! and Hamlet together offers a good opportunity to consider what’s working, and perhaps what’s not, in lockdown performance. One unnecessary element of both productions for me was the inclusion of interactivity and audience participation. It’s something I’ve enjoyed a lot in past productions, both from Creation and other companies. However, here it felt somewhat surplus to requirements. In a move that reminded me of the 2019 Shakespeare’s Globe production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream which cast a member of the audience as Starveling each night, both productions had willing audience members take on roles. Horatio! cast members of the public as Ophelia, Gertrude and Claudius to be briefly invited into Hamlet and Horatio’s Zoom call, whilst WhatsApp saw an audience member take on the more extensive role of Mistress Quickly, allowing them to interact with Alice and Meg during a couple of scenes. Whilst it worked adequately in both productions, it didn’t add anything to either experience for me — in fact, I found it pulled me out of the respective worlds of the plays that had been so effectively created up until that point. WhatsApp went one further at another point, with Alice and Meg inviting the audience to suggest what they should do to Falstaff to get their revenge by using Zoom’s whiteboard feature, giving those watching the power to write whatever they want. Whilst I enjoyed the exploration of how the conferencing software could be used in different ways, this felt too much like a gimmick that had been tacked onto the performance, and again added too little to the production overall.
These minor reservations aside, there was a huge amount to like — and to be impressed by — in both productions. The fact that the immediate comparisons which come to mind are televisual emphasises just how far lockdown Shakespeare has come in the six months since it first appeared in the second half of March. Both WhatsApp and Horatio! undoubtedly share DNA with the BBC comedy series Staged, filmed during lockdown and broadcast in June (and which has its own Shakespearean echoes evoked by its two stars, David Tennant and Michael Sheen). It’s not hard to imagine the characters in these two Creation productions appearing on our TV screens in weekly installments, or perhaps in Horatio!’s case a series of Zoom calls between characters from other plays. A strength that’s perhaps too easy to overlook in both productions is the fact that they were convincingly set in a recognisable version of our world. Virtual backgrounds can occasionally work wonders — Theatre for a New Audience’s Mad Forest is the prime example (or perhaps the exception that proves the rule). But as a general rule, seeing actors perform in a real setting is far more engaging, something which both WhatsApp and Horatio! have further proven.
One final thought: smaller two-hander productions such as these wonderfully affirm that Creation is not just about making their online performances bigger and bigger, instead showing a comprehensive commitment to lockdown theatre in all the forms it might take. The Merry Wives of WhatsApp and Horatio! and Hamlet ably demonstrate just how effectively theatre can be created with two people on a Zoom call, and both will go down amongst my favourite Shakespearean productions of 2020.
There are currently no further scheduled performances of Horatio! and Hamlet. However, further performances of The Merry Wives of WhatsApp are scheduled for 3–4 October 2020. Tickets can be booked on the Creation Theatre website.
Production Details:
The Merry Wives of WhatsApp
Presented by Creation Theatre via Zoom, 4–6 September, 2020. Written by Olivia Mace and Lizzie Hopley. Directed by Natasha Rickman. With Lizzie Hopley (Meg Page) and Olivia Mace (Alice Ford).
Horatio! and Hamlet
Presented by Creation Theatre via Zoom, 17–19 September, 2020. Written by Nicholas Osmond. With Ryan Duncan (Hamlet) and Nicholas Osmond (Horatio).
¹ Peter Kirwan, The Merry Wives of Windsor (RSC/Live from Stratford-upon-Avon) @ Broadway, Nottingham, The Bardathon (2018) https://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/bardathon/2018/09/13/the-merry-wives-of-windsor-rsc-live-from-stratford-upon-avon-broadway-nottingham/
