IT was a Sunday night in York, actress Victoria Fitz-Gerald had been drinking for four hours, and two bottles of Prosecco were now playing the prankster in her befuddled head.

This is the way with Sh*tfaced Shakespeare, whose modus operandi is for one cast member per show to be selected for a session of controlled drinking before being unleashed on the Bard, fellow actors and the audience alike with a licence to wreak havoc when said actor should probably be barred.

Aptly, the latest play to be subjected to a drunken assault is Measure For Measure, and Fitz-gerald had certainly had her fill, measure for measure, as she took on the role of Lucio, ironically the force of law and order, in director Lewis Ironside's heavily edited, one-hour version of Shakespeare's problem play.

Or, rather, Shakespeare's problem play with an extra problem: a drunk on stage, too unruly for the night's host and producer Stacey Morris to control. At its best, this theatrical conceit could deconstruct Shakespeare in amusing and unpredictable ways, but it turned out that a sozzled Victoria Fitz-Gerald was more like a stray from one of those tiresome hen parties that clog up York city centre every weekend with their pink-painted crassness. She dressed up, she swore, she lewdly demanded sex. Plus ca change.

Far better were the impromptu reactions of the sober Shakespeareans around her, bouncing off her Lucio like a dodgem car, while clinging to the wreckage of a hijacked play already full of indecent proposals, mistaken identities, cruel beheadings, frantic beddings, cross-dressing and undressing. Drunks as a rule outstay their welcome and one hour of Fitz-Gerald's transformation into Fizz-Gerald was more than enough.

Earlier in the festival, double act Max & Ivan's work in progress was so much still in progress that their scripts almost never left their hands. They had just put five hours' tedium on the A1 to use by re-writing parts of their Edinburgh Fringe show, and York would be the crash-test dummy audience for Our Story.

This is part of the role of the Great Yorkshire Fringe, a filter for what may or may not work in the hotbed of Edinburgh, and the former Edinburgh Comedy Award nominees left the White Rose Rotunda with a feeling of "Needs more work".

They started in Eric and Ernie mode in dinner jackets, at ease with each other and their respective roles, where neither is the obviously funny one, against comic convention. Ivan (pronounced how Ivan Lendl pronounces it) soon took off his clothes, rollerblading around the tent with only a fig leaf to save his modesty, much as one of the Grumbleweeds still does every year in a tumbleweed moment in pantomime.

Surely it had to improve after that? Alas not, as Max & Ivan strove too hard for laughs that stayed out of reach. End of story.