The stage is simple – the story is not. Mister Shakespeare was a one-stop-shop through the great bard’s mind. Set in London in 1606, a rampant plague spreads death while bewildered citizens try any quack remedy to halt its progress.

Add to this terror, a suspicious king is shaken by the recent gunpowder plot. A wrong word risks imprisonment death or worse. Meanwhile, Mister William Shakespeare is isolated in his rooms to avoid contagion and trying to cope as he is, what can only be described as ‘hassled’ by voices from the outside world.

Actors shout for new roles, playwrights and contemporaries his contemporaries Ben Johnson and Christopher Marlowe beg to collaborate, his brother whines for help, his wife wants her marriage back, his lover wants.. love and he displays guilt and frustration over all these things as his waking and sleeping hours are disturbed.

These voices join the solitary actor – the only actor physically in this play – is Mister Shakespeare. All the other characters are merely a suggestion, projected onto the stage via voice recordings through a window or door to the streets below.

During and in spite of all this clamour, and with the London theatres closing, Shakespeare confines himself to his Southwark lodgings and there he directs his attention to work on what were to become some of his finest works King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra and Macbeth

In this new play by Michael Barry, brought to you by the team who created The Eva Cassidy Story, Shakespeare is explored as the man, the father, the actor, and the entrepreneur.

Here we see a very human Shakespeare. Ambitious, troubled, funny, loving, trying to make sense from the chaos around him. He’s basically in lockdown, trying his best to get through with all that his mind throws upon him. Sound familiar?

Lockdown forces him to confront his own demons guilt associated with his family, the death of his beloved son Hamnet, the dread of his Catholic upbringing being revealed and frustration that he couldn’t earn the respect of his father. 

Mister Shakespeare examines how the events of the time influenced the direction and content of many of his plays.

How one man can remember this complicated soliloquy alone, I can’t possibly fathom. But I was drawn into this tale and felt as though I was there in the apartment with him, hoping he wouldn’t be driven mad by the demons who clambered at him. And willing him to get to ‘work, work’ and get it all out on paper into the tales we cherish today.