Russell Kane's Fakespeare

There's a extraordinary amount of Shakespeare rewritten, rejigged and, indeed, regurgited at the Fringe. But as Kane helpfully points out in his opening spiel (a concession, perhaps, to those who've come to see a stand-up), "there's none of us rewritten as Shakespeare". Such, then, is Kane's task: to take the narratives of modern Britain and transform them into Jacobean drama. And, by'r lakin does this work.

Kane's versification is impressive enough in itself, but simply shoehorning the lines into iambic pentameter would add little to the take of Nigel the broke banker – here reconfigured as King Nigellio. Shakespeare's blank verse was never just an exercise in virtuoso wordsmithery, and happily, the same applies to Kane. Poetry can do what prose never can, permitting subtext, allusion, ambiguity and humour though metaphor, rhythm and rhyme. So, contemplating suicide, Nigel soliloquizes: "should mine account be emptied solely for their interest?"

Sure, Kane resorts to cheap celebrity jokes quite frequently—arguably, Shakespeare did as well—but his tightly-wrought wordplay is brilliantly loaded with meaning, ranging from hilarious bawdiness to touching subtlety. Dramatically, too, this is genuine drama rather than glib pastiche. Nigel's PA and mistress, Donna of Billericay, is played beautifully by Sadie Hasler: daft enough that she becomes a truly tragic victim (in the classical sense – she is a flawed character who moves unheedingly to her demise), but not so dumb that she fails to inspire empathy. There's a few clumsy areas still to iron out, but what Kane overwhelmingly demonstrates is that he's more than a comedian dipping his toe in the theatrical world. There's a dramatist in the making here.