EDFRINGE REVIEW: Prague Shakespeare Company's Fringe Rep

Love’s Labour’s Lost – ★★★☆☆ – Uneven
Othello – ★★★☆☆ – Compressed
Hamlet Redux – ★★☆☆☆ – Lacking substance

Prague Shakespeare Company
10-16 Aug
Review by Rebecca Mahar
 
Prague Shakespeare Company presents a triple helping of Shakespeare this Fringe, with a series of productions that are ambitious in their efforts to bring full-cast renditions of their plays to the stage in dramatically reduced timespans, but with executions that fall short of their aims.
 

Love’s Labour’s Lost

Helen Hopkins as Armado and Bree Welch as Costard in Love's Labour's Lost. Pic: Lux Praguensis.

Love’s Labour’s Lost is a very silly play to begin with. A group of young men commit themselves to three years of scholarship and austerity with the King of Navarre, foregoing many pleasures, notably the company of women. These vows are immediately broken when the Princess of France and her entourage arrive, with the men falling immediately in love, and the women plotting to mock them for their profligacy— until, late in the game, a messenger arrives with grave news that shifts the tone of the play, and we conclude without the weddings so inherent to the comedic genre, but with the men pledging a year of various types of service before returning to see if their loves are true.
 
At only an hour and fifteen minutes, this Love’s Labour’s, directed by Evren Odçıkın in an adaptation assisted by dramaturg Philippa Kelly, is light on detail, but manages to get the basics of the plot across. Its major pitfall is that it seems to be existing in two different dramatic worlds: the male characters are, to varying degrees, caricatures of themselves (not necessarily a negative in and of itself), where the female characters exist in a much more grounded sphere, subtlety and cohesion in their performances. It’s possible this is intentional, part of the same commentary on the play as is the company’s choice to employ an all-femme cast. If so, it has regrettably not landed. 
 
From the extremes of Bree Welch’s Chaplin-esque Costard to Elizabeth Gore’s detailed Rosaline and Sarah Spring’s nuanced Princess of France, these two sides of the lovers’ coin are not of the same currency. Even further afield, the characters of Holofernes and Nathaniel are not explained at all, tacked on to the main plot like an afterthought and without introduction. There are excellent performances across the company: they simply are not all living in the same world.
 
As an introduction to this lesser-performed Shakespeare play, Love’s Labour’s is worth seeing, and reflects well on its actors, showcasing their skills in shaping distinct characters.
 

Othello

Rosie Ward as Desdemona and Aldo Billingslea as Othello in Othello. Pic: Lux Praguensis.

One of the most challenging plays in Shakespeare’s canon, Othello tracks the twisted scheming of Iago, jealous ensign of General Othello, also known as the Moor of Venice, and how his plots and whispers doom those around him to death and misadventure. 
 
Othello has recently married Desdemona, daughter of Senator Brabantio, and promoted the young soldier Michael Cassio to Lieutenant, passing Iago over. Iago, incensed by what he sees as a slight against him and preferment of a soldier with little practical experience, as well as being suspicious that Othello has slept with his own wife Emilia, alerts Brabantio of the secret marriage and sets out to convince Othello that Desdemona has been unfaithful to him with Cassio.
 
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous, is a line that belongs to a different Shakespeare villain, but it’s certainly what Iago has done in this play. Carefully laid plots and dangerous inductions require time to develop and sink their poison fully into the ears of their victims, and time is exactly what this Othello lacks. Seventy-five minutes is a cracking pace at which to cut any Shakespeare play, demanding absolute precision in mining the most essential aspects of the script, taking care to maintain the integrity of the story. Love’s Labour’s just about manages it: Othello does not.
 
There is simply not enough time to give space for Othello’s doubts and anxieties to develop convincingly, despite the best efforts of veteran Othello actor Aldo Billingslea, who has six previous credits in the role to his name. There’s little lacking in any of the performances, with Billingslea, Matt Radford Davies as Iago, and Rosie Ward (who also directs) as Desdemona putting in particularly excellent turns. Rodrigo and Cassio being cast extremely young, Othello and Iago appearing age-peers to Brabantio, and Desdemona appearing somewhere in between does make the negotiation of some interpersonal relationships more awkward than it already is, but this is no fault of the actors.
 
Given a full-length Othello, this company would have no trouble delivering a noteworthy production. They are let down only by the compression of the adaptation within which they work.
 

Hamlet Redux

Fady Demian as Hamlet, with Charlie Blows as Laertes, Kevin Hopkins as Claudius, and Claire Nicholls as Gertrude in Hamlet Redux. Pic: Lux Praguensis.

Notoriously Shakespeare’s longest play, Hamlet opens in the aftermath of the king of Denmark’s death, when the old king’s brother has married his widow with great haste and assumed the throne, leaving prince Hamlet grief-stricken, distraught, and angry. The tragedy follows his efforts to expose his uncle as having murdered his father, plagued by ghosts, pretend madness, real madness, political manoeuvring, betrayal, and death. The original Hamlet is long for a reason, and while it’s almost always cut in some manner for performance, to try and cohesively tell the whole story in only an hour is nearly impossible
 
Hamlet Redux, adapted by Stephanie Fleischmann and Dmitry Troyanovsky, directed by the latter, does not succeed in this attempt. It selects a few lines each from key scenes, stitching them together with movement sequences, music, and the company melding between a chorus of Players and the principal roles each embodies. Only seven of Shakespeare’s thirty-three named characters remain, and in its ruthless attempt to streamline the script, Hamlet Redux has lost the plot. It would likely be incoherent without foreknowledge of the original.
 
The concept itself is interesting: the framing device of the players telling the story, their chorus-like function, the physical work and movement as a storytelling tool. Unfortunately, there simply is not enough meat to the text for the actors, who are doing as much as they can with it, to fully communicate the story or represent three-dimensional characters. Combined with strange production choices such as having Hamlet stand in a dark corner during his famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy and the incorporation of one of the most famous Shakespearean misquotations (“alas, poor Yorick! I knew him well” —Horatio having been excised from the play—), Hamlet Redux never had much of a chance.

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Love’s Labour’s Lost
Running time: One hour and fifteen minutes with no interval
Venue: main house at C ARTS (Venue 6), Lauriston Halls, 28 Lauriston St EH8 9DH
10, 12, 14 August 2026
Time: 8:50pm
Tickets: https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/love-s-labour-s-lost
 
Othello
Running time: One hour and fifteen minutes with no interval
Venue: main house at C ARTS (Venue 6), Lauriston Halls, 28 Lauriston St EH8 9DH
10 & 11 August 2026
Time: 7:20pm
Tickets: https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/othello
 
Hamlet
Running time: One hour with no interval
Venue: main house at C ARTS (Venue 6), Lauriston Halls, 28 Lauriston St EH8 9DH
11, 13, 15 & 16 August 2026
Time: 8:50pm
Tickets: https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/hamlet-redux