William Shakespeare's Land of the Dead

This play is not as funny as it tries to be, but it is a great choice for an audience full of Shakespeare enthusiasts. The text is packed with references to the Bard’s major works, often lifting key phrases from his plays and dropping them into the characters’ dialogue. Some of the historical references, such as Will Kempe’s nine-day Morris Dance, the legal conditions of theatre in Queen Elizabeth I’s England, and the violent entertainment of bearbaiting might not make sense to those who have only read a couple of Shakespeare’s works and do not know more about Elizabethan London. The characters, historical or otherwise, are entertaining and well developed. After the initial story and conflicts are set up, however, this play becomes another victim of the recent zombie/supernatural creature craze that has dominated the media in the past few years and dissolves into a wacky historical supernatural adventure. The parallel with the bubonic plague of Shakespeare’s lifetime is pretty clever but not really developed. This play is a bizarre mix between a horror story and a guilty pleasure for Shakespeare aficiandos that, strangely enough, manages to satisfy both of these categories.