Photo Flash: First Look at Sh!t-Faced Shakespeare's THE TAMING OF THE SHREW

Will Petruchio jack it all in and stay a bachelor? Will Kate be tamed or tanked? Sh!t-faced Shakespeare® returns to Leicester Square Theatre with their drunken antics and drunken actors to tell the tale of a shrew who turns from tempestuous to tamed, probably. With one genuinely inebriated actor every night, The Taming of the Shrew features cross dressing, food fights, a highly underwhelming horse, one too many bum cheeks and more twisted gender politics than you can shake a fawning fat-skinned fustilarian at!

Following Sh!t-faced Showtime®: Oliver With a Twist! (27th March - 12th April), Magnificent Bastard Productions return to Leicester Square Theatre for the first of their Sh!t-faced Shakespeare® shows in a bumper year for the internationally acclaimed company. After The Taming of the Shrew, the company will be hamming up Hamlet (29th June - 14th September) before hotfooting to McEwan Hall for Edinburgh Festival Fringe, with one more show to be announced for the Autumn.

Still not sure how it works? Each performance takes a cast of professionally trained, Shakespearian actors and every night one carefully selected company member is tasked with drinking for a full four hours prior to show time. The remainder of the sober cast are tasked with wrangling our drunken hero through a 70 minute adapted script trying their level best to keep the show 'on the rails' while incorporating into the world of the play whatever drunken shenanigans are thrown at them. With the original text reduced to the primest theatrical cuts and no time to spare, every night is a high-energy race to the finish through an ever changing series of drunken detours.

Formed in 2010 Magnificent Bastard Productions were just friends who loved creating unexpected and unpredictable theatre at music festivals such as Secret Garden Party. Sh!t-faced now performs across the UK, Australia and USA in Boston, Atlanta and Austin. They sell-out at the Edinburgh and Brighton Fringes annually, and in 2015 expanded into Sh!t-faced Showtime®, a pissed-up hour of harmonious Broadway showtunes. In addition to these UK dates the company will be presenting Sh!t-faced shows at Brighton fringe, York Fringe, Edinburgh Festival Fringe, in the USA and in Australia this year.

Founding member of Shit-faced Shakespeare® and director of The Taming of the Shrew Rev. Lewis Ironside said, "Having remorselessly mucked about on the UK's Fringe Theatre circuit for several years a small, and relatively modest, comedy show finally exploded onto the West End stage some four years ago. This "little show that could" has since gone onto wow hundreds of thousands of audience members, tour the globe, win numerous awards, sell packed houses across three continents and become a beloved staple of the West End scene. Whether you consider it high art or merely disrespectful, lowest common denominator nonsense, one cannot deny its indisputable place among the pantheon of modern British theatre... The Play That Goes Wrong is taking bookings through to summer."

Photo Credit: Rah Petherbridge