It is a truth universally acknowledged that drinking on the job is rarely a good idea. But when Brigitte Freeme drank five shots of tequila and a glass of prosecco on stage on a recent Sunday afternoon in Brisbane, she was simply following stage directions. Brigitte Freeme (left) and Chloe Stojanovic in Woodward Productions’ Plied and Prejudice.
One cast member gets drunk on stage in each performance. Credit: Woodward Productions Freeme was playing the lead role of Elizabeth Bennet in a 90-minute parody production of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice titled Plied and Prejudice . She occasionally collapsed into giggles.
At one point she riffed with a pair of audience members who had come along dressed in high-waisted Regency dresses. “You made more of an effort than we did,” she quipped. Plied and Prejudice is the first show in the “drunk theatre” genre from Brisbane’s Woodward Productions.
Originating some 20 years ago at the Edinburgh Festival, the format always has one actor in the ensemble getting inebriated, for real. Freeme (Elizabeth) and Stephen Hirst (Darcy) star in this broadly comic adaptation of Jane Austen’s 1813 novel. Credit: Woodward Productions Off-Broadway’s Drunk Shakespeare has been combining booze and the Bard since 2014, and Britain’s venerable Sh!t-Faced Shakespeare toured Australia with a sloshed Macbeth in March.
“It brings an element of theatrical excitement and risk, because something could change in the moment,” said producer.
