We met the theatre troupe who are doing the Bard’s work and bringing it to a new audience

Having first heard of the concept in 2021 when catching up with an old friend, the idea immediately intrigued me. Watching Shakespeare while high? Performing Shakespeare while high? Sounds like a recipe for beautiful, enjoyable, disaster

Before every show, the audience members are told to take a bottle cap each and vote for one of the six cast members that will be the “chosen stoner” for the evening. The two cast members with the most votes are then announced, and five audience members are selected and given signs saying “Fie!”, which they are allowed to show at any given point during the show. Once “Fie!" is called, the show pauses, our two stoners rip a bong, have a breath, and the show resumes. As you can imagine, hilarity ensues

Having seen their engaging TikToks and Instagram posts crossing my feed, I later ran into one of the feature actors and got to chatting with him. I realized that Verve had to have a sit down with the Baked Shakespeare company to pick their brains about what it is and what all goes into it. 

We caught up with the full cast on their last weekend performing The Two Gentlemen of Verona at The Outlore Base,and discuss the Bard, the bud, and the art of theatre.

Now let us introduce the feature players

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

SQ: Hi, my name s S’qhamo, my friends call me SQ, well everyone calls me SQ. I am an actor, and i do comedy as well. This is my second year of Baked Shakespeare now, and its been its own journey. A lot of talented guys, a lot of cool people

Sarah: Hi, I’m Sarah, also known as Sarah. Its also my second year of Baked Shakespeare now. I am an actress. And yeah, thats about it

James: Hi, I’m James, I too am an actor, this is my third year now with Baked. I’ve just been doing film and theatre wherever it pops up

Laura: I’m Laura, and I too am an actor - 

Sarah:  - (laughing) it’s weird that we’re all actors right?

Laura: - Right? I do stand-up comedy as well, and a little bit of producing work on the side as well, but stage performance is my passion. Oh and I’ve been with the company for three years

Erin: Hi, I’m the one and only Erin Gemmell. Well aside from Erin Gemmell that was at the Olympics. We’ll hash that out in a battle to the death one day. This is my third year with the Baked Shakespeare company, and I am a stage, musical theatre and straight theatre actor as well

Sarah: Hun there’s nothing straight about you!

Jake: Wassup wassup, Jake Maisel, actor, producer and surfer. Just thought I’d throw something different in there. I’ve been with Baked Shakespeare since 2021, a lovely group of people

Erin: And why is that Jake? Why have you been with the company so long?

Jake: Okay okay, I’m the company founder

All: Wooooo!

Okay so the first question goes to you Jake, How did Baked Shakespeare come about?

Jake: Well we started it during COVID, no shows, no theatre, no university happening, me and one of my friends decided to put on a wacky show. I pitched it to a local bakery, Olympia Cafe, and as rough and indie as it was, we sold out every night of our run, and the rest is history. Four years and five shows later, we’ve even been to the UK performing at Edinburgh Fringe

And what was touring in the UK like?

Laura: It was so cool. Only Jake and I went though. We started off with a run at The Fringe Festival in Scotland, and that was a lifelong dream of mine to perform there. It was so nuts to be doing it at such an early point in my career with something so bizarre (and something so not legal there), but we somehow got on there. It was insane, and because we were so jazzed just to be there, we also did a short run in London after the festival, and we closed our run in London with a massive show on Brick Lane, which is a cornerstone of the London social scene, which was another sold out show, it was all so nuts -

Jake: - and I lived on a houseboat. 

Erin: That was  Jake’s one take away from the experience, was “houseboat”

Sarah: And you guys didn’t do bongs there right?

Laura: No bongs, because we needed to keep it somewhat more subtle, just 50mg THC gummies and a weed pen backstage to keep us on a level. I much prefer doing the bong, I must say

That leads me to my next question, what is it like performing on stage while high?

Sarah: Two of us have peed on stage. From laughing.

Erin: I had to change my pants!

Laura: Just last week at Stellenbosch, James was chosen and after taking his first bong hit he comes off stage and just pisses in a pot plant.

Sarah: We also had a really funny situation during one of the scenes where Jake and I had to kiss, but he was super high and he forgot his lines, and he just kept kissing me! The cue is we’re supposed to kiss and break away, and while kissing I can just feel that this man is not present, he's having an out of body experience right now.

Erin: That’s what is so crazy to me, a lot of people are like “oh I could never do that” or you must be such a good actor and memorize your lines, and yes, you do have to be good actor, but there is something about being high, and being on stage in front of people, the audience is there for it to be fun. I don't usually feel anxious or paranoid when I'm on stage. It feels very held, and the adrenaline just pushes you. You’re just going, going, going, and there's momentum. As soon as you get off stage however the momentum stops, and then you sit down and you just don't want to get up again.

Sarah: Waiting backstage while high is by far the hardest part. Yes we’ve done it in front of each other a million times, but that’s the lovely thing about theater, is that you find something new and deeper every time you perform a piece, so we always surprise each other. 

Erin: There definitely is also a part of it that plays into the lowering of inhibitions, so you feel more free to try new things in the performance.

Sarah: It also depends on the duo getting chosen to smoke. If it's me and Laura, we just get giggly, whereas if its Jake and I there’s like a sibling rivalry, a one upmanship going on.

Erin: And SQ and I just have a good time together. SQ is so serious, until he cracks.

SQ: I try so hard man!

Laura: When you get chosen to be the one that must get high, you just have to be prepared for these people to do anything to get you to break - 

Erin:  - and the audience wants you to break, that’s the other thing, they’re in it with you. But you can't force it, you can't do it because it’ll be funny, it has to be organic, which is why you have to take it so seriously.

Sarah: That’s really the nice part as well about our show, is that with formal theatre you have to be perfect. For us we can just be passionate and goofy and silly and play constantly on stage, and play with our audience, which is really cool. And it's different every time, because of the different combinations of smokers, the different shows, the different audiences, it's just the best!

Erin: It really has been the most insane experience as an actor, dong this, because there is nowhere else that you would do something like this

What does preparation look like? Since you don't know until the actual show who will be performing while high, how do you prepare for that?
Sarah: We don't practice, we don't smoke. The first time we smoke is on opening night.

Laura: A lot of people think we rehearse stoned, and that is the furthest possible thing we want. You will get sent home. We need to make sure that when we get on that stage, should we not get chosen, we need to be confident enough in our performances so that the two of us who are high feel supported, they have the space to make mistakes, to throw things at the wall, to do whatever they want to do, so the sober people need to keep the ship moving.

Sarah: I think it's really important that our rehearsal process is a lot longer than the norm, so much so that it almost becomes muscle memory. There have been points where I've been chosen to smoke and I get backstage and I look at Jake and I realize that I know none of my lines. But the moment you get on stage again everything comes back to you.

Erin: Not to get drama theoretical, but Stanislavski says, well he speaks about actions and focusing on the actions, and the action is a performance, but he also talked words, music and words, but specifically words, are also an action, and words can also provide muscle memory of a sort as well, and it's kind of the track that you follow.

Laura: Particularly with Shakespeare that comes in handy, because it's not just chatting to your friends, there is a flow to the speech pattern, and words that we don't use in modern language, so picking up on those things cements the performance for you as well.

On the topic of Shakespeare, what is like performing The Bard’s plays while high? Do you find a new interpretation of the text?

Erin: Absolutely! As I said it definitely releases your inhibitions. It's also so interesting because the audience isn't your typical Shakespeare audience. 

Sarah: Well isn’t it?

Erin:  Well exactly! Like I would go and watch both shows, because I like Shakespeare. But the people that come to watch ours aren't fans of Shakespeare, but they still enjoy the Shakespeare of it all, which is what's really cool about all of it. With the stoned element, we’re kind of taking away the pretentiousness of it

Jake: One of my favourite things to do when I was a student, this was before Baked Shakespeare, was to get high and rap Shakespeare soliloquies, because of the cadence of it. 

Sarah: Give us one now!

Jake: I could! But back to the answer, there was a moment at one of the shows where I was high backstage, where at the end James has a really long monologue, and I was sitting there thinking “Wow this way he’s hitting this cadence, this is why I love Shakespeare”.

Sarah: And sometimes you can get lost in that rhythm. It's happened to me while on stage and high, where you get to the end of a monologue and you think to yourself “am i even making sense?”, because you aren’t even present because you’re high, you're just saying the words. Then you watch the footage back and you see “okay yes I was right!”. There's just something musical about Shakespeare because of the iambic pentameter.

Jake: Maybe because my love of Shakespeare was always accompanied by cannabis, I don't think I would have loved Shakespeare without rapping it.

Sarah: - and I mean, Shakespeare was written for the degenerates of society, everyone was high and fucked up at those shows. So here we are, dong the Bard’s work, to bring it back.

Laura: One of my first shows with the company, Twelfth Night, I got selected with Jake to smoke, on opening night, and I was so baked through one of my monologues and this was the first time that I did it high. But I got clarity for the meaning that I never had throughout the month-long rehearsal process. I was like “oh my word, there's so much more here that I never saw. I just needed to hit 5 bongs to understand the work!”

Jake: School would have been so much more fun if we had done this!

Erin: Even with this particular show, I was stressing so much about the delivery of my role, I had so many thoughts, my stress was getting in the way maybe a little bit. I don't think I was doing a bad job, I was just getting jimmy way maybe a little bit. The first night that I smoked, and performed, I just found this lightness and this goofiness, that I don’t think I had allowed myself to experience before, it just got lost with the stress of it all.

Sarah: There is just something really healing about knowing that you're allowed to mess up, and you’re allowed to goof. This show has helped me with my confidence so much. We all hold each other really well

What has the reception been like? What kind of community have you guys built around yourselves?

Sarah: Stoners are the best people! The nice thing is, some people have walked into the show not realizing what “baked”means - 

Erin: We’ve had some walkouts! Not gonna lie.

James: We’ve had the police called on us. Twice.

Sarah: It's always the best when you see some old tannies walking in with their rolling chairs, and seeing them get into it. Even the Paternotser crowd! They were an older crowd, but after the show I taught a 70 year old man how to rip a bong! Highlight of my night. I think because Baked Shakespeare is a very safe space,and our audience knows that. There is something vulnerable about being high in front of so many people, everyone knows the paranoia and anxiety that can be linked with it, the audience also supports us through it.

Laura: Another thing that brings people to our shows who wouldn't necessarily go to the theatre, outside of the weed aspect, is that our presence on social media is very welcoming, we always want to look like we’re your friends. As much as we’re performers playing a role, we are more so the actor than the character, and that brings a familiarity with our audience that you don't get with other shows.

Jake: It breaks that sense of detachment.

Sarah: We completely break character and engage with our audience as well during the show.

Erin: People don’t necessarily vote for the character Valentine to get stoned, they vote for the performer Erin to get stoned and try to play the role, and that’s what they come to see.

Laura: My friend Josh has seen the show five times and he cannot tell you what the play is about, not a single thing about the show.

Erin: People do come over and over again as well, because every night is different, and we build this rapport, it’s a community more than an audience.

Sarah: I think the difference is also us coming out after the shows, and chilling with our audience, having a jiggy or a beer, and just chatting to people after the show, just finding out if they enjoyed everything and getting to know them.

James: Something that warmed my heart recently was me meeting a couple that has been watching us since our first show, and it's not even someone that we know, not any of our friends, but they’ve been with us the whole time, and they were so invested. Even when it comes to the voting, they’ll remember who got stoned last time so they’ll make sure they vote for someone else this time, its crazy.

SQ: We’re very lucky to have the following that we do. It also cool to see that we have a real audience, because we all do other things as well, variety shows or comedy or other stage plays, but to engage with our audience, and have an audience that is so ready to just enjoy themselves in whatever we as Baked Shakespeare create.

Sarah: People have asked me, “do we have to get high at the show” and I always tell everyone, it's not mandatory that you get high, it's only mandatory that we smoke at our shows - 

SQ:  - It's mandatory that you have a good time!

Erin: It's literally on our Quicket page

Sarah: Honestly, the rowdier the better. The more involved our audience gets with us, the happier we are! It what the company is all about, is breaking down those barriers

Erin: It's lovely that we’re building a following as a company and not just as a show

James: And it's not just the following that we’re building here in Cape Town, or in South Africa. Baked Shakespeare has been to the UK, we have people messaging us from the US all the time - 

Sarah: - We won Bronze Ovation at the National Arts Festival in Makhanda! The moment where we won was the most Baked Shakespeare aesthetic thing we could do, we’re sitting on the floor in the back, exhausted from the show, Laura is sitting rolling a joint -

Erin:  -I was so baked, we were sitting there like “there’s no way” -

SQ:  - We’re carrying our props with us, we had walked out of our venue into the awards ceremony - 

Laura: - and the bongs had not been cleaned the whole week - 

Sarah: - we didn't even know what they were announcing, we just heard “Baked Shakespeare” and Laura jumped up shouting “WE WON!”

Laura: - weed flies everywhere -

Sarah:  - and we have to go on stage all ratchet and sweaty and high -

Erin: It was honestly one of the most surreal experiences of my life

For the last question before you guys have to go get ready for your performance, for people who haven’t experienced theatre, what are they missing out on? What do they need to know about the medium?

Erin: THEATRE IS LITERALLY THE LIFEBLOOD OF THE ARTS IN THIS COUNTRY! GO SUPPORT THEATRE! (laughs) But it's true though. We have a lot of film and television productions that come out of this country, but a lot of stuff comes from overseas. I just really think theatre, fringe theatre, small theatres in Cape Town, is the breeding ground for talent in this city. You need to go and support the arts, because the arts are how we process life and society!

Sarah: I also think that with fringe and smaller groups, we will make a whole scene with nothing but a stage and an audience - 

Erin: - and that’s all you need! You need an audience, and a stage!

Sarah: I think that’s where we differ, it's not massive sets, it's not big builds, there’s great lighting always of course, but it's simple. I mean look at our set, it's just drapes

SQ: One of my favourite things about Baked Shakespeare is that it’s making theatre more accessible. We all go to theatre, we love theatre, but often when we go, we go to theatre shows in Cape Town, and the audience is just old white people. And theatre caters to that as well. Baked Shakespeare is affordable, it's fun, and it's for everyone. People who come to THE Outlore for Baked Shakespeare are now watching other shows that The Outlore puts on, and it's dope

Erin: - shoutout to The Outlore Base. Kim and Liam are amazing, and they do so many cool things, just open your eyes and go watch it!

SQ: The other thing is, I understand supporting the arts, but I also want it to get to a point its not supporting because people are doing us a favour to come see the show we put on, I want you to support the arts because you want to do it, this should be your friday night, because you love this. 

Sarah: Let’s be real, Ster Kinekor, Nu Metro, they’re expensive nowadays. Our tickets are always cheap. You can smoke, you can relax, you can carry on, you can be loud, you can be rowdy, you can laugh, you can cry - 

James:  - you can cheer, you can shout out, we want you to be a part of the show. It’s not the audience that's over there and we’re doing our thing, we’re building the show together
Laura: Go to theatre because I truly do believe it's the purest art form that humans can create. There is no filter. It’s just you, some words, and whatever platform you choose. It doesn't even have to be a stage. Theatre can happen on Long Street. Theatre can happen at Moveable Feast (I do it every Saturday). Theatre is pure, it's fun, and you should watch more of it

The Baked Shakespeare team were kind enough to bless us with tickets for the show as well, so we stayed afterwards for the full immersive experience. Little did we know what a riot it would be.

Now as a secret fan of Shakespeare (Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes will always be my Romeo and Juliet), I came for Shakespeare. But I got so much more than just Shakespeare. 

I was honestly blown away by the talent of the cast, and even with  the minimal set dressing I was fully thrown into the world of 16th century Verona. It may have been the joint I smoked before, the free edibles which were thrown out to the crowd, or the sheer skill of the actors as they fully transformed into their characters. Either way I am sold. 

There is a side to Shakespeare outside of the high school textbooks, the scholars and the analysis. You don't have to know what iambic pentameter is, you don't even have to be high, all you have to do is catch a Baked Shakespeare show and you will realize how fun, and funny, Shakespeare can be. 

So like Sarah said, embrace your inner 16th century degenerate, leave the woes of your dreary life behind, and go be entertained by 6 actors living and playing out their passions on a stage for us, and get lost in their world for an evening. 

In the words of Shakespeare himself,  “I like this place, and could willingly waste my time in it.”