The Fat Slags and Shakespeare might seem an unlikely combination. But here Simon Thorp, co-editor of Viz, explains why the comic has teamed up with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
The RSC contacted Viz because they are doing a season of Shakespeare comedies and a festival called Laugh-In in the autumn, and they thought we might like to do some designs for them. Apparently, the comedies make fun of "the lower orders", and for some reason they thought that would be right up our street. I read in a newspaper yesterday that we were going to be doing the sets and costumes, possibly even acting in the plays, but in fact we are just doing a poster and maybe a leaflet. There's also going to be an exhibition of our drawings in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre to accompany the festival.
We have a character called Luvvie Darling, a failed actor full of pointless anecdotes who goes round hugging other actors and then forgetting his lines - he might have given them the idea to get in touch with us. None of us at Viz really know anything about Shakespeare at all. In fact, none of us had ever been to a Shakespeare play until three or four weeks ago when the RSC invited us to go and see Twelfth Night at Stratford-upon-Avon. The Chuckle Brothers is more our level, and, frankly, the sight of Barry Chuckle on the stage of the Sunderland Empire in a pair of women's pants, singing I Believe at the top of his voice, beats Malvolio for laughs hands down.
You could say it is a rather unusual partnership. We sit here in our offices thinking about toilets and vomit and things all day, so it's nice to focus our minds on a slightly higher plane for a change. We - me, Graham Dury and Davey Jones - have been doing the comic for 25 years now, and nobody civilised has ever come to see us.
Early on, we decided not to try to design Viz-style Shakespearean characters. Our cultural and historical references are principally Carry On films with a smattering of Blackadder, so we'd only be showing ourselves up. Instead, we are trying to draw parallels between Shakespeare's characters and our Viz characters. All of our main characters will probably get roles - but we aren't quite sure yet which ones. We need somebody who paid attention during O-level English Literature to tell us.
Viz has a very broad readership, but they're probably mostly convicts. If we get them interested in Shakespeare it'll be difficult for a lot of them to get to the theatre, especially the ones who are in high-security prisons, which is a shame. From the look of the audience who went to see Twelfth Night, the Shakespearean crowd isn't really our natural readership. But the bard's jokes aren't that far removed from Viz's: he's got unconvincing characters, contrived plots and jokes about piss, and so have we. The only difference is we don't know as many long words as he does.
