Camping it up Shakespearean style

The best thing about Andrew Doyle's new play is its title. With its echo of Shamela, Henry Fielding's pomposity-pricking satire on Samuel Richardson's sententious 18th-century blockbuster Pamela, it seems to promise a rollicking, exuberant parody of Shakespeare's Dane. What we actually get, alas, is a lot less high-minded and much more derivative.

The madcap plot has a disorientatingly random feel to it. A theatre producer talks to Shakespeare's ghost, plans to ransack his grave for the manuscripts of his 'lost' plays and moves in with a Lithuanian landlady with a partially forked tongue named - wait for it - Mrs Slutska.

Meanwhile his cast, which includes a nymphomaniac and a nun who has never been to the theatre before (and why not?), begin rehearsals.

There are a few sequences from Hamlet, treated successively in the style of a tacky musical and a highbrow opera, but for the most part the action consists of a lengthy parade of theatrical campery and a ragbag of gags - everything from Noel Edmonds to surreal references to scalping vegans and slapping badgers.

It comes as no surprise to discover that the author is a stand-up comedian and sketch writer. Perhaps less predictably, he's also a scholar trying to make a serious point about what he thinks the Bard was really like (his Shakespeare is both blokish and gay). The proficient cast (including David Janson and Debbie Arnold, pictured) deliver the material with Èlan but can't make it sound more original or coherent.

Until Sep 24, King's Head Theatre, 115 Upper Street N1, Tue to Sat 8pm, Sat and Sun mats 3.30pm, £20, £16 concs. Tel: 020 7226 1916. Tube: Angel

Shamlet
King's Head, Islington
Upper Street, Islington, N1 1QN