England’s Jumbled ‘Hystery’

Sarah Olmsted Thomas, left, and Kari Ginsburg, right, dish out barbs at a tavern.

New name, new direction? Not really. The group formerly known as the Washington Shakespeare Company begins its new life as WSC Avant Bard with the same off-the-wall Shakespeare productions it’s been doing for 21 years. The new handle simply makes the company’s mission — to rejigger classic plays — more explicit.

Avant Bard’s first Shakespeare production, “The Mistorical Hystery of Henry (I)V,” is a reimagining of Shakespeare’s two-part “Henry IV,” with bits nabbed from “Richard II” and “Henry V.” Both versions tell the story of Prince Hal, whose dad, Henry IV, pressures him to become a politician and warrior while Hal just wants to hang out at the tavern with his miscreant friends. In the original, Hal synthesizes his two lives into one and emerges a great leader: Henry V.

“Mistorical Hystery” sees things a little differently. “Instead of taking the best things [Hal] learned from the proletariat and the best things he learned from the ruling class, he takes the worst of both worlds and transforms himself into a worse dictator than his own father,” says adaptor-director Tom Mallan.

The show makes good use of the texts Mallan’s incorporated, creating something that’s about as faithful to the source material as “The Lion King” is to “Hamlet.” The script is still mostly Shakespeare, just stitched together to emphasize the points Mallan wants to make.

“Mistorical Hystery” is set in an alternate reality that resembles WWI-era Britain, rife with song, dance and sketch comedy. That allows Mallan to comment on today’s headlines. “The prostitutes [in the tavern] get to reflect on, mock and basically make a travesty of the political prostitution around them,” Mallan says.

Scenes normally played between King Henry IV and his courtiers are instead played as sketch comedy on the stage of the tavern. When King Henry shows up in person, “it’s like when Sarah Palin showed up on ‘Saturday Night Live,’” Mallan says. “The people impersonating him have to face him.”

It’s not that much of a stretch: As Palin tweeted after inventing the term “refudiate,” “Shakespeare liked to coin new words, too.”