A SPYMONKEY CO-PRODUCTION WITH BRIGHTON FESTIVAL AND ROYAL & DERNGATE NORTHAMPTON

Tim has adapted and directed this barnstorming show, exploring the 74 onstage deaths in the works of William Shakespeare – 75 if you count the black ill-favoured fly killed in Titus Andronicus – with the remarkable Spymonkey.

The deaths range from the Roman suicides in Julius Caesar to the death fall of Prince Arthur in King John; from the carnage at the end of Hamlet to snakes in a basket in Antony & Cleopatra; from Pyramus and Thisbe to young Macduff. There are countless stabbings, plenty of severed heads, some poisonings, two mobbings and a smothering. Enorbarbus just sits in a ditch and dies from grief. And then there’s the pie that Titus serves the Queen of the Goths.

Spymonkey perform them all – sometimes lingeringly, sometimes messily, sometimes movingly, sometimes musically, always hysterically. The four ‘seriously, outrageously, cleverly funny clowns’ (Time Magazine) will scale the peaks of sublime poetry, and plumb the depths of darkest depravity. It may even be the death of them.

Directed by Tim, and designed by Spymonkey regular Lucy Bradridge, THE COMPLETE DEATHS is a solemn, sombre and sublimely funny tribute to the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.