Comedy gold: The Upstart Crow at the Gielgud Theatre reviewed

A Moorish princess shipwrecked on the English coast disguises herself as a boy to protect her virtue. Arriving in London, she’s hired by William Shakespeare as an assistant to his maidservant Kate, who instantly falls in love with the exotic cross-dressing newcomer. This absurdity, familiar to fans of Twelfth Night, is the opening move in Ben Elton’s exquisite Shakespearean remix, The Upstart Crow.

It’s 1604 and the Bard is in poor creative form. ‘I have banged out a few clunkers of late,’ he admits, referring to Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well. ‘Should have been All’s Well That Ends Crap,’ suggests a lackey. Enter a Puritan who denounces drama as an ungodly art while slapping himself across the face to purge his soul of sinful thoughts. This gives Shakespeare an idea. He will ‘Malvolio’ the Puritan and send him a fake love letter purporting to come from Kate. Meanwhile Kate’s affair with the disguised princess is compounded by the arrival of the princess’s twin brother, also shipwrecked on the English coast, who has dressed himself as a girl.

The elevated silliness of Elton’s many-layered plot is superbly handled. He steals key elements from classic plays and welds them on to the known facts of Shakespeare’s life. His two daughters, Susanna and Judith, arrive from Stratford and are forced to pledge their affection for their father in order to secure a portion of his estate. Maidservant Kate plays the role of Cordelia in this affectionate King Lear spoof. Elton is clearly a formidable Shakespearean scholar and he delights in satirising Jacobean English which was more thickly laden with Anglo-Saxon than the language we use today. ‘Tufting-mufflers,’ and ‘cockling-pouches’ are his coinages for human genitalia. He calls homosexuals ‘gaysome hugger-tuggers’.