From Monday, October 8, the Literary Canon explodes at the Everyman Palace Theatre as the Reduced Shakespeare Company unleashes a brand-new comic outrage on an unsuspecting public, with All The Great Books (abridged).

Fresh from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the comedy troupe takes the audience on a ‘ninety-eight minute roller-coaster ride through its compact compendium of the world’s great books’. The story device is that the students – the audience – have signed up for a remedial literature course which they must pass in order to graduate. Unfortunately the regular teacher has been trampled to death at a JK Rowling book signing. With what turns out to be ill-fated enthusiasm, the football coach, drama teacher and a student teacher step in to help.

But first we need to backtrack. We start by getting a suitably abridged history of The Reduced Shakespeare Company, of where its origins lay, who’s involved and what it is exactly that this troupe do? Austin takes up the thread. “The Reduced Shakespeare Company is a three-man comedy troupe that reduces long serious topics into short sharp silly comedies. The company was founded by Daniel Singer in 1981 and performed exclusively at Renaissance Faires in northern and southern California.  The original group of five, including two women, was gradually whittled down to the three guys who became known as the “original” RSC:  Daniel Singer, Jess Winfield, and Adam Long.  They began with 20 minute versions of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, and followed that up in 1987 with The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged).

The formula applied to their productions is pretty simplistic – but, how does the process of whittling down these renowned and beloved literature work? And do they specifically look to extract the humour first from literature, or is maintaining some semi-balance of relevancy considered on the same par? “We always do too much research but then discover it’s hard to make jokes about things that people don’t understand,” says Austin.  “What’s wonderful though is that we don’t have to dumb anything down – people actually know more about our subjects (history, literature, the movies) than they think they do! Basically, we cover the material everybody knows, and cover more aspects of the material if we can think of a joke for it.”

In ‘Great Books’, the story device has the audience as students who have signed up for a remedial literature course which they must pass in order to graduate. Do the audience play any further part in the production, or is the premises simply a set-up for what goes on on-stage? “There’s an element of audience participation in all our shows, and Great Books is no exception.  We ask the “students” to take a midterm, for instance....and anything else we ask them to do I wouldn’t like to give away. But audiences shouldn’t feel intimidated if they haven’t read all the books.  God knows we haven’t.”