The Tempestuous: A Shrew’d New Comedy. Old Red Lion Theatre.

New Zealander Penny Ashton has carved out a niche with her bawdy one-woman musical comedies that skilfully pastiche the style, characters, and storylines of famous writers. Promise and Promiscuity delivered a feminist appropriation of Jane Austen. Olive Copperbottom did the same for Dickens. Shakespeare gets his turn in The Tempestuous.

The show blurb says, “It’s just like Shakespeare, only shorter”, which might be true if the Bard watched a lot of game shows and wrote about menstrual cycles.  A better approximation is TV’s Upstart Crow with songs, dick jokes, and a panto vibe. Still, the writing is clever, and Ashton (and the audience members periodically roped in) work their socks off.

Sicily’s King Enzo is dead. His widow, Carlotta, is being pursued by the late monarch’s dodgy brother Guido. She is not sure she wants to remarry, but honour calls and with Sicily at stake, “what hast love got to do with it”.  Guido’s friend, the nefarious Duke Olivani, at the behest of the weird sisters, sets about gaining the hand of Enzo’s daughter, Rosa.  The young lady, who has her sights set on Giuseppe, the local nurse’s son, is not for taming. “To flee or not to flee,” she muses. I would prefer to “get me to a nunnery” than marry Olivani, she concludes. But how to escape her fate?  The answer comes in a game show that combines elements of Blind Date and The Great Sicilian Bake Off and may well be titled “The Taming of the Choux Pastry”.

Ashton has a talent for mimicry, which is just as well with so many characters. Even then, you may find some of the plot twists a little tough to navigate. But it is good-natured stuff, erudite rather than laugh out loud, but wittily penned with a nod to iambic pentameter. The songs help, particularly a version of Puccini’s Nessun Dorma accompanied by what looks like a ukulele (Ashton calls it a “lutelele”). Solid fringe fare.

Writer and Director:  Will Shakespeare and Penny Ashton