Writer/Performer: Alex Floyd
In As You Like It, the melancholy Jaques utters one of the most famous metaphors in Shakespeare’s canon, if not the whole of literature. “All the world’s a stage,” he intones, “and all the men and women merely players.”
That is the inspiration, it seems, for French performer Alex Floyd’s piece of stand-up deconstructionism. If all the world really is a stage, if everything happening on Earth is part of one large performance, then what is the point of people gathering in a small black box to watch a performer, when the real show never ends?
What indeed. There are moments of clowning silliness from Floyd, especially in the beginning when she seems afraid of the microphone and has to take a running jump from the wings in order to approach it. From there, Floyd appears to be starting into a piece of stand-up character comedy. But with no real warm-up to get the small audience excited, there is none of the atmosphere that would make such work interesting.
From that lukewarm start, Floyd struggles to engage with her central premise. We get some genuine insight into the “we are all performing” concept as Floyd describes how we often start each morning convincing ourselves that the day will be better – optimism as a form of performing to ourselves.
There is not much in the way of anywhere to proceed with this suggestion, though. Indeed, Floyd punctures her own thesis by stopping the show to bring out a kettle and coffee press, making herself a cup of coffee in painstaking detail. The general point is that we want more from performers than the mundanity of everyday life. But when spending five minutes waiting for water to boil is one of the more exciting portions of a scene, it’s a sign that something is not really working.
That is a shame, because when Floyd really lets her sense of the absurd fly, there is something very charming about it. The best moment comes when she recounts bumping into Gene Kelly in her local supermarket, as he decides to turn the store into a musical. An increasingly frenetic rendition of Good Mornin’ from the musical Singin’ in the Rain is so delightfully bonkers that one wishes the rest of the piece had the same sense of manic comedy.
Instead, most of the piece consists of awkward delivery and overlong stretches of elements that don’t work, such as an extended sequence in which Floyd screams from offstage.
There are plenty of occasions where Floyd questions the rationale of sitting in a small space watching an incomprehensible, almost self-indulgent piece of theatre. For that self-awareness to really work, the work itself really needs to rise above such descriptions, layering upon them a piece of theatre that confounds and contradicts that expression of disappointment. We keep watching In Shakespeare We Trust in the hope that a larger piece of metatheatre will emerge. Sadly, it never does.
Reviewed on 18 May 2026 and then continues to tour
