The Upstart Crow: Exit pursued by outdated humour
SPOILER WARNING: This article contains detailed descriptions of the plot and characters of The Upstart Crow, currently running at the Gielgud Theatre in London.
Ben Elton’s hugely popular TV series Upstart Crow recently transferred to the stage with a limited run of The Upstart Crow — a specially adapted theatrical version of the TV sitcom. David Mitchell reprises his role as William Shakespeare alongside Gemma Whelan as Kate, the daughter of Shakespeare’s landlord who longs to become an actress, and Rob Rouse as Ned Bottom, Will’s long-suffering servant. As with the TV series, Ben Elton weaves the plots of Shakespeare’s plays into this fictionalised Shakespeare’s life. Opening with Egyptian Princess Desiree (Rachel Summers) being washed ashore following a shipwreck that she fears has killed her brother Arragon (Jason Callender), we are clearly grounded in Twelfth Night territory as she disguises herself as a boy to keep herself safe on the tough streets of 1605 London.
Following the established trope for fictionalised Shakespeares, Mitchell’s Shakespeare is facing writer’s block — and, as per usual, leaning heavily on the women in his life for inspiration and the more-than-occasional stolen line. Kate hands him King Leir and our second adapted plot as we see Shakespeare take Leir as inspiration not for his own play, but his life. Placing himself in the role of Leir, Shakespeare constructs a plan to give all to his two daughters, Susanna (Helen Monks) and Judith (Danielle Phillips), and Kate and spend time with all three of them in the hope of giving himself space to write. It is no spoiler to say that this goes as well as expected! Both plays are expertly interwoven into the plot. The supercilious Dr Hall (Mark Heap) is sent up in a Malvolian fashion with increasingly wide puffling pants and a cross-gartered codpiece adding slightly crass panto-esque sitcom humour. This Twelfth Night parody occurs in parallel with the more serious Lear-influenced commentary on Shakespeare feeling the impact of being an absent father trying too late to bond with his now adult daughters.
The play draws heavily on theatrical conventions, sending up the idea that any actor in a mask is immediately unrecognisable — at its most extreme Burbage (Steve Speirs) fails to recognise Mr Whiskers (Reice Weathers), his bear-napped dancing bear, simply for the fact that the bear is wearing an eye mask. The inclusion of the bear is itself a set-up to provide inspiration for Shakespeare’s most famous stage direction, ‘Exit pursued by bear’. For fans of the show there is a happy ending of sorts — Kate finally gets her chance to act, playing Desdemona alongside Prince Arragon as Othello, offering a nice intertextual reference both to Margaret Hughes, the first female actor on the British stage with her 1660 performance of Desdemona, and Gwyneth Paltrow’s Viola in Shakespeare in Love — and the play ends fittingly with a jig.
I wish I could end this review on a similarly positive note — but, sadly, I can’t. Outside of the Shakespearean allusions, Elton’s comedy is cheap verging on offensive. We are encouraged to laugh at and not with any number of ‘outsiders’. The humour surrounding the Egyptian twins comes worryingly close to people of colour all looking the same — a point compounded by Burbage insisting that, much as he can play Jewish characters with his prosthetic hooked nose, he could black-up to play Othello. And black-up he does, albeit off stage in a cowardly move by Elton and director Sean Foley, with the rest of the cast watching on and commenting through the windows as Burbage is arrested in place of the Egyptian Prince. Implied blackface is still blackface, and it was uncomfortable being in a theatre in which the majority of the audience found the gag funny.
The offence is not limited to race: a discussion of the sexual preferences of King James I and Queen Elizabeth I adds nothing to the plot apart from an opportunity for crude references to the LGBTQ+ community, a joke continued by Dr Hall at the end of the play. The ‘joke’ in question is that the historical John Hall held no medical qualifications, but Heap’s Hall can be a doctor as he self-identifies as one and we have to respect that — a line delivered by the actor with what can only be described as mincing. It got a huge laugh from the audience — a member of which commented to her companion after the show that ‘it’s not wrong, there is too much pandering to the gays and the blacks’.
The treatment of Kate is also problematic. Her commentary at the start of The Upstart Crow on Shakespeare’s ‘recent’ plays Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well is founded fully in 2020, with her blaming their lukewarm reception on the questionable gender politics of forced marriage and non-consensual sex. Having given her the right to comment on the problematic elements of these plays, Elton undermines Kate’s position, placing her within a plot that sees her at risk of forced marriage to puritan Dr Hall and, in seeking to avoid that by taking inspiration from Juliet and taking a drug to feign death, being straddled and kissed while unconscious by Shakespeare. Both plots are played for laughs rather than any greater commentary on early modern or indeed 21st Century female power. Shakespeare is warned by Bottom that straddling and kissing the drugged Kate is not acceptable — and yet he does it anyway and with no attempt by Bottom to stop him. Kate is subjected to the exact treatment she complained about at the outset — her views essentially ignored and mocked. Kate’s objection to Mr Whiskers being kept as a captive dancing bear draws on both animal rights and notions of slavery, but hers again is a lone voice against a tidal wave of outdated humour. Mr Whiskers’s ultimate acceptance of his role has undercurrents of the ‘tame savage’ trope — the slave choosing slavery.
There is a reading of the play that could treat the uncomfortable humour as sending up those that tend towards casual sexism, racism and misogyny. At times, characters break the fourth wall and step out of the play to comment that the Jacobean times were more diverse and accepting than perhaps realised. However, these set pieces are themselves played for laughs: delivered quickly and in a lecturing tone, the implication is that it is those that seek to educate who are the subject of the joke rather than those in need of education. Similarly, with the exception of Kate, whose views are based firmly in 2020, there is a happy acceptance of the status quo and any attempts to undermine that status quo are mocked. It’s anachronistic: yes, Kate’s views aren’t in keeping with the general feel of 1605; but writing in 2020, Elton’s jokes feel out of place, outdated and cheap — perhaps more suited to a 1970s TV sitcom.
If you are after a postmodern take on Shakespeare, David West Read’s & Juliet at the Shaftsbury Theatre is a much better option, offering an engaging and diverse take on the relevancy of Shakespeare for modern audiences.
