Watson: Shakespeare Fight Club
Live Review
Melbourne International Comedy Festival

The only problem with Shakespeare Fight Club is the Shakespeare.

Luckily, that isn’t too big a deal, as this gleefully chaotic indulgence is as close to the Bard as drunken karaoke is to the Royal Opera.

But the complete works have been so mocked so many smug drama students over the decades, that it’s a real turn-off. Putting on a regal cloak and intoning very theatrically, or speaking modern sentences into iambic pentameter have long lost their interest. However putting characters into a ‘no holds Bard’ death-match tournament, as sketch duo Watson have done here, is a new one… even if the parodies – when they do acknowledge that they have to them – are still rather forced.

Shakespeare nonetheless provides the structure for what Tegan Higginbotham and Adam McKenzie do best: anarchy. They frequently corpse, insert lines into the loose script to trip each other up, and comment on the chaotic way the action is playing out. The dynamic between them is excellent, and they keep these late-night proceedings loose and fun, without fully tipping over into self-indulgence.

Jokes come at the expense of the cheap plots, the missed cues, inappropriate asides and the limitations of this tiny stage. Cameron McKenzie and Liam Ryan, recruited to provide a cast of fight club opponents, join in the knockabout banter with abandon too.

It’s a joyful experience, revelling in its own lack of significance. There are probably better vessels yet to come for the glorious Higginbotham and McKenzie, but this is an entertaining end-of-the-day fillip.