Amazon’s Fallout series has been a major boon to Fallout 76, bringing new players and renewed attention to the game in its current state. This is a much-needed boost since the rocky first impression the game made, though the show also inspired something else—a core piece of the recent performance of Richard III from the Wasteland Theatre Company. The Best War Games spoke to Wasteland Theatre’s acting Artistic Director Jonathan Thomas, known in-game as Bramadew, about their adaptation of the Shakespeare classic into a Fallout 76-themed play they call Richard the Ghoul.
Grim-Visaged War Never Changes, Even in Fallout
For the uninitiated, the Wasteland Theatre Company was born during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, a time that made the company’s founders think of the age of Shakespeare. During the Bard’s day, the bubonic plague had shuttered playhouses, much as the pandemic had closed theatrical venues. There was also the vaguely apocalyptic feel of the early days of the pandemic, whose imagery evoked the idea of a post-society wasteland.
Though other virtual theatres like Final Fantasy 14’s A Stage Reborn predate the pandemic, the field today remains largely new, fresh for trailblazing troupes like Wasteland Theatre. So, performing plays like Coriolanus, Romeo and Juliet, and even Alice in Wonderland adapted for the Fallout setting still carries a lot of historical significance for the performing arts.
The latest in this legacy is Richard III, or as it’s called in Wasteland Theatre’s production, Richard the Ghoul. The title may be somewhat evocative of Walton Goggins’ character in the Amazon series, and that’s no accident. Thomas says that the character of The Ghoul was inspiring for the adaptation.
"Richard's disfigurement. We changed that to a ghoul because that's a very common ailment that you'll run across in the wasteland. There are feral and non-feral ghouls, and the non-feral ones have found their way to integrate themselves back into the society that is growing and rebuilding.
Having Richard, who historically had scoliosis and would have been thought of as less of a person in the time, and changing that to a ghoul was just so easy, and it just fit inside the universe."
That isn’t the only nod to Fallout's Amazon series in the play. Since Richard is marrying his cousin in the play, the company borrowed from one of Lucy’s lines early in the show: “Having sex with your cousin is not a sustainable path to keeping the vault alive.” Though beyond those two points and a choice to put Shady Sands front and center, Thomas said the show had less impact on the play than other parts of the franchise. Thomas has said that audiences have reacted very well to their adaptation:
"We have a lot of support from the community in itself; other live streamers, people that make podcasts or make fan fiction or whatever, and they're all super supportive.
They tune into the live streams, they'll even try to get on the server and watch it in person if they can. We have felt the love from the community and people that are aware of us and we're highly grateful for it."
How Adaptations Meld with Fallout and the Performing Arts
There are three plays that the company is looking at, explained Thomas, and which they do next might be based on which script is done first. Hewing close to their successes with Shakespeare, two of the three options are Hamlet and Twelfth Night, but the Wasteland Theatre does stray from the Bard from time to time.
They’ve done works by Lewis Carroll and Charles Dickens, after all, and the third they’re looking at is Aristotle’s Frogs (presumably to be playfully titled Radtoads). Frogs would draw from Amazon’s Fallout series as well, as the corporations of the pre-war world make great analogues for the Greek gods:
"You know, in the show where you have the boardroom of all the different CEOs–Vault-Tec and REPCONN and RobCo and whatnot–talking about the use of the nuclear bombs to have a reason to test the vaults. The general population is always at the whims of these larger entities in Fallout; the different corporations.
That, we think, translates very well to Frogs, because it's humanity realizing, 'Oh, the gods are actually in control, and there's really nothing we can do. We're just at the whims of their mercy.'"
Whether it be Frogs, Twelfth Night, or Hamlet, the Wasteland Theatre Company is always accepting new players for their next show. Those interested in joining Wasteland Theatre can contact them on X (formerly Twitter) at @76Theatre, though Thomas cautions that most of their work requires the PlayStation version of the game. Still, Thomas says they always bring on at least one new person per show and look forward to meeting that new person for their next play.
Fallout 76
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