Shakespeare was perhaps the world's greatest master of the sound bite. His pithy pentameters have assumed a permanent place in our cultural consciousness. If pressed, we can cast our minds back to high school drama class and dredge up snatches of dialogue from King Lear or Hamlet. All the world, it seems, has become a stage for the Bard's witticisms and wisecracks.

With its show The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), currently at the Criterion in London's West End, the Reduced Shakespeare Company takes one of the Bard's immortal epigrams--"Brevity is the soul of wit"--to its illogical limit by compressing the entire 37 plays into a hilarious 97 minutes. Clad in Elizabethan garb and sneakers, the three members of the R.S.C.--Matthew Hendrickson, David Letwin and Adam Long--are men of many parts in their ribald romp through the Bard's greatest hits. Hendrickson does a wicked witch from Macbeth, Letwin is a hapless Hamlet, and Long specializes in tragic heroines. The resulting mayhem is Shakespeare performed as a Tex Avery cartoon, the Marx Brothers meet the Bard of Avon.

Not surprisingly, there is plenty of madness in the R.S.C.'s method. Some dramas, like the obscure King John, are dispatched with the merest of mentions. Others are lampooned at greater length, as in the five-minute sketch that makes Titus Andronicus a gory gourmet-cooking program. The R.S.C. does musicals too, presenting a thoroughly postmodernized take on Othello in gangsta rap: "Here's the story of a brother by the name of Othello/ He liked white women and he liked green Jell-O/ And a punk named Iago who made hisself a menace/ 'Cos he didn't like Othello, the Moor of Venice."

Not even Shakespearean scholarship is spared the slings and arrows of outrageous parody. These nutty professors note Shakespeare's frequent references to meat--specifically pork--leading them to conclude that the plays were in fact written by Francis Bacon.

But the group puts on its most antic disposition for an extended burlesque of Hamlet. Midway through their spoof of the Great Dane's existential crisis, the actors decide to "workshop" the character of Ophelia. This means plucking an unlucky damsel from the front row to play the lead and dividing up the rest of the audience into Ophelia's id, ego and superego. "We want to update Ophelia for the 1990s," Long explains, "by highlighting the conflict she feels between career and family." After about 15 minutes of cajoling and ad-libbed banter, Long has half the audience chanting, "Get thee to a nunnery!" and the other half shouting, "Cut the crap, Hamlet; my biological clock is ticking, and I want babies now!" For a grand finale the merry trio does the entire play again, this time in 45 seconds; then it does it backwards.

Originally formed in California in 1981, the R.S.C. has been traipsing around Britain since 1991, performing variations on its slapstick send-up of the great dramatist. The group has even spun off a clutch of condensed clones throughout Europe. Now audiences from Helsinki to Budapest can watch native R.S.C.s performing the abbreviated Bard in their own languages.

But The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) is not all fun and games. Beneath the R.S.C.'s zaniness lies a real appreciation of the Bard's genius. During the troupe's hilarious conflation of Hamlet, the players pause to summarize the plot. The sumptuous "What a piece of work is man" speech, Long insists, simply can't be missed. He then gives a completely deadpan delivery of that speech. After a few nervous chuckles, the audience falls silent. You can hear the proverbial pin drop as Hamlet ponders the earth, the sky "fretted with golden fire" and the "quintessence of dust" that is himself. The speech ends, the theater is hushed--then Hendrickson interjects: "So we'll skip that and get right to the killing." And with that the group is off again, whizzing toward the play's climactic sword fight. But by dropping this little interlude into its otherwise manic performance, the R.S.C. shows that for sheer majesty and brilliance, you just can't beat the Bard's own words--not even with a shtick.