To quickly address the obvious question: no, you don’t need to have seen Reservoir Dogs to enjoy this show…but it does help. I went to see this show with a friend who had never seen Tarantino’s film, and I hadn’t watched it since 2021, though I brushed up on it before writing this review. We also sat next to someone who had clearly seen the movie recently and was laughing at every gag. So, regardless of your exposure to Shakespeare or Tarantino, you’re in for a great time. The Ghostlight League’s adaptation is a charming, witty show performed by a cast full of chemistry.
The writer (Steven Hopley) and director (Rob Lloyd) are clearly aware of the tropes they’re adopting and use them to create a rich and layered world. A ‘bardcore’ band plays covers of the original soundtrack, the staging is sparse and the cast is genderbent – it’s ‘hyper Shakespearean’ and proud of it, heightening its conventions for laughs while still entirely ‘committing to the bit’. The script mostly sticks to the original structure and meaning of the film’s dialogue, which makes it fun to hear how Tarantino’s macho banter gets reworded into poetry, with a few real Shakespeare quotes thrown in as easter eggs. The only moments that seemed out of place were some of the more violent scenes; it would be hard and somewhat inappropriate to be just as bloody as the film, but I couldn’t help feeling that some moments could have been gorier and more visceral rather than being played for laughs. Despite this, the intensity, rhythm and borderline homoeroticism of the original story feel right at home in the world of Shakespeare, which is a huge credit to the ambition and skill of the team who married these two distinct styles.
Both film and stage show depend on the rapport of their ensemble cast, and the Theatreworks production really stuck the landing with their actors. Many have worked together before in other companies such as Scary Goats Theatre, and there isn’t a weak link among them. Some highlights include the fraught and physical bond between Sir Orange (Elysia Janssen) and Sir White (Cassandra Hart), Seon Williams’ deft delivery of ‘Elizabethan’ English as Sir Pink, and Corey Glamuzina’s portrayal of Sir Blonde, an effortlessly slimy psychopath. While occasionally some of the English accents made lines harder to parse, the strong physical acting across the board made it easy to get sucked into the story, and every character felt multi-dimensional, no matter how many or few lines they got.
While this adaptation successfully showed the similarities between Shakepeare and Tarantino as storytellers, there’s one key difference at its heart: while Shakespeare mostly wrote about those with legitimized state power (royals, nobles, merchants etc.), Reservoir Dogs lives in the criminal underworld. The slight twist to the play’s ending shows an awareness of this theme and lays bare the potential of adaptations like these. William Shakespeare’s Reservoir Dogs is definitely a novelty and a fun night out, but it also stands on its own as a captivating tragicomedy about power, trust and the blurry lines between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ guys. It’s an ambitious show that has set my own personal standards very high for what adaptations of Shakespeare should be, and I look forward to seeing what this creative team does next, whatever influences they may pull from.
To book tickets to William Shakespeare’s Reservoir Dogs, please visit https://www.theatreworks.org.au/2026/william-shakespeares-reservoir-dogs.
