Review: Adam Long’s Dickens Abridged – Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh Fringe

First published in The Times, Saturday August 29 2015

Four Stars

It is nearly 30 years since the Reduced Shakespeare Company first brought their Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) to the Edinburgh Fringe. These days you can’t move at the world’s biggest arts festival for 60-minute parodies of everything from Hamlet to Breaking Bad, but the original vintage is still the best – as this enjoyable musical comedy, written and directed by Adam Long, one of the founding members of the RSC, attests.