Updating Shakespeare for today

The only moment you get left of the hook is in the porter scene, the ‘knock knock’ jokes. Now the reason I did that….updated those, before anybody asks, is because when Shakespeare wrote that, those porter jokes, the originals, were exceedingly funny to the Elizabethan audience, and he knew cause he’s brilliant, that here is a play that is full of horror, terror, and murder, and you’re descending into this chaos of doom, if you don’t have a little break before you then go even further, you’d never stay the distance, so he wrote a funny little scene in there which is odd.

Now the original jokes, “Knock, knock. Who’s there? Here’s a farmer hanged in the expectation of plenty” – Not funny, right? They are not funny because they are relevant to 1606. So I just updated them which is what Shakespeare wanted I think. He wanted that moment to be a belly laugh moment. And of course the audience goes, ‘Holy moley! We are allowed to laugh.’ And we refer to the play, ‘To be or not to be, whoops the wrong play’, all that stuff. I don’t mind about that. I love that. Shakespeare did that. All the world’s a stage you know, so I think we worked in the right vein for that. And then after that little porter scene where you get let off the hook for a minute, it just goes on and on and on with more and more blood and more and more horror. So that was my intention.