THEATRE REVIEW: The Book Of Will - Shakespeare North Playhouse, Prescot, Liverpool.

It is the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s First Folio being published. In addition to the BBC spamming the airwaves with Shakespeare, Shakespeare North Playhouse in Prescot is also having a celebration. Their production of “The Book Of Will” by Lauren Gunderson – co-produced with Bolton’s Octagon Theatre and Hornchurch’s Queen’s Theatre – is a lively, sparkling piece of period dress theatre that hits all the high notes, and gives an enlightening experience of how the First Folio came into existence.

Carla Goodman’s very simple set focused on a wooden pub table and chairs. The characters – Jacobean jobbing actors, long-suffering wives, and inky printers – were plainly dressed, but every costume was unique. (Every actor was wearing a different style of shoes, for example.) In the intimate in-the-round space of the wooden theatre, this helped the time-travel feel of the production.

Shakespeare has been dead a few years, and bootleg reproductions of his plays are everywhere, both on stage and in print. His closest friends are worried that all these bad copies will be all that’s left of his genius. The problem is: they themselves are getting old and starting to forget the lines he wrote for them, and very few complete scripts of his plays still exist, due to a recent fire. It is proposed to find all the plays and have them published in one big (and expensive) book: the First Folio.

Driving the project is King’s Men actor Henry Condell (a gently woebegone Niall Costigan), and dragged along in his wake is retired actor John Heminges (a put-upon but intelligent Russell Richardson.) Between the two of them, they start to overcome every obstacle that arises: from financing the most expensive book of plays ever produced, to deciding if “Pericles” is uncorrupted enough to be included.

Ed Knight, the prompter for the King’s Men, was played with venal dryness by Callum Sim: never tangle with an annoyed librarian. Fortunately his assistant, Ralph Crane – a nerdily joyous Tomi Ogbaro – is quite the Shakespeare fan, and had been making secret copies of his own of the plays before the fire occurred that destroyed most of the official copies. The villainous William Jaggard, head of the printing company responsible for many bootlegs, slid around the stage with reptilian grace in Zach Lee’s performance.

Making up the cheerleader squad were the King’s Men’s women. Heminges’ daughter Alice sang the praises of Shakespeare’s female characters (a bolshy Jessica Ellis.) Heminges’ wife Rebecca alternated between selling figs and lightly castigating her husband about working too hard (a delicately witty Helen Pearson.) Condell’s wife Elizabeth was the quiet supporter (a grounded Carrie Quinlan.)

The noisiest moments of comedy came from the pretentious boy actor destroying Hamlet (the vivacious Tarek Slater), and the very Falstaffian portrayal of Shakespeare’s biggest rival: playwright Ben Jonson. As Jonson, Andrew Whitehead exploded with excess in every direction: alcohol, lechery, and ego. His performance was worth the ticket price in itself.

Director Lotte Wakeham sustained a warm ensemble feel to the production, and then at the end delivered a montage of rapid Shakespeare excerpts showing Shakespeare’s legacy reaching the 21st century and countries around the world. A paper shower of little Shakespeare quotes from the ceiling at that point was quite a nice touch.

As an extra treat, Shakespeare North Playhouse has also borrowed an edition of the First Folio from The British Library, and has it on display in the foyer during the run of “The Book Of Will.” There is a facsimile edition too that can be thumbed through with grubby fingers.

This is one for Shakespeare fans everywhere.

Reviewer - Thalia Terpsichore
on - 20.10.23