You can buy Spymonkey’s ‘Complete Death’ card game at the Oxford playhouse when it hosts The Complete Deaths. Divided up into macabre categories like speed, hideousness and the last line, and designed by children’s laureate Chris Riddell, they are sure to be a big hit.

They will accompany the play which ploughs through 75 Shakespearian deaths in just over two hours, a bizarre and brutal premise under most circumstances.

But not when performed by Spymonkey's four clowns but how this hilarious project came to fruition however is all down to Tim Crouch who seized the concept with alacrity and ran with it.

Trawling the Bard’s full repertoire he seized on each and every staged death, discarding all those that happen elsewhere such as Lady Macbeth and Cordelia) and crafting them into a scripted and hilarious show, performed by Spymonkey, a troupe of European clowns.

Delighted with the results, the actor, director and writer now pops into to see their performances wherever he can around the world, unless his own work prevents him from doing so. (We only managed to speak because he was off to Chicago and waiting for a train while Spymonkey performs in Istanbul).

“It was the perfect project for both of us,” he tells me from Platform 5. “Spymonkey has done Moby Dick and The Odyssey so why not Shakespeare? The more ridiculously ambitious the better because they are best when they fail.

“We aren’t talking clowns in the English sense with red noses and funny shoes. These are more European, extremely physical and very funny. They have been together for 18 years and are quite extraordinary.”

Weaving in Spymonkey’s own story between the endless fatalities, the tensions, the excitements.

“But on this, Shakespeare’s 400th anniversary, it seemed the right thing to do.”

Regardless of their artistic licence and the comedy factor how many novel ways are there to die on stage? “Oh endless ways,” Tim tells me. “But I didn’t need any help in imagining them up because Shakespeare did all the work for me.

"There are 25 stabbings alone, plus suicides, poisoning, bludgeoning, mobs, sword fights. In King John, Prince Arthur fell off a wall and then there are the weird ones like Cleopatra and the snake, so in terms of method and diversity he couldn’t have done a better job.

“I mean look at King Lear. His death in Shakespeare’s text changed the face of Western literature. Until then King Lear had always had a happy ending. Shakespeare challenged 150 years with his nihilistic depiction.”

As for the actual passings, Tim says some are long and drawn out and others sudden, some use camera and cinematography, others sound and music.

Was he inspired then by the Reduced Shakespeare Company condensing it's plays? “No, more by a puppet show I saw in Vancouver last year which was entitled ‘famous puppet deaths scenes’ which was brilliant," he laughs.

"Because the thing about all these deaths is that however tragic or well acted, they are always a nanosecond away from hilarity as they lie there trying not to breathe, Juliet trying to heave Romeo’s corpse off her. There are so many comic moments that help relieve the tension.

But what if we can’t tell who’s who? “This is not an academic piece of theatre at all where you have to know your Shakespeare. And we have a device on stage which lists the play and character as each new victim appears," he pacifies me.

Currently touring and performing in his own show I’m Malvolio as well as taking a new work Adler and Gibb to the Edinburgh Fringe in a few months, you can tell that Tim loved every minute of The Complete Deaths and is proud of its outcome.

“It was a two years project which then took three weeks to write and three weeks to rehearse.

“I love performing but obviously Spymonkey is a troupe of four,” he says, almost regretfully. “But they are so exceptionally talented that it was an absolute gift of a piece of theatre. All we have to do now is encourage everyone to go and see it.”

The Complete Deaths

June 6-8

Oxford Playhouse

01865 305305

oxfordplayhouse.com