There may have been five "droppers" – a theatrical term for fainting audience members – overcome by the fake bloodshed at Titus Andronicus at The Globe last year, but one new play is promising considerably more than the nine brutal on-stage deaths in Shakespeare's first tragedy.

The Complete Deaths will detail all of the Bard's 74 scripted deaths in one play, from early rapier thrusts to the more elaborate viper-breast-application adopted by Cleopatra. The total makes Shakespeare's complete works more gory than notorious HBO TV show Game of Thrones, which has scripted 61 deaths in 50 episodes, including the controversial burning of a child at the stake.

Tim Crouch, who is directing the play for Spymonkey production company, told The Times he had spent "a lot of time going through each play" to find all 74 human deaths – he has excluded that of a fly that meets a sticky end in Titus Andronicus.

The Complete Deaths will open at the Northampton Royal and Derngate Theatre in May 2016, before heading to the Brighton Festival for its official premiere and touring the country. On the show's website, the play is described as "a solemn, sombre and sublimely funny tribute to the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death", and will be performed by just four actors.

Over the past four centuries, the brutality of Shakespeare's plays has become the subject of endless academic study, but his contemporary critics didn't approve of the on-stage gore. Michael Dobson, director of the Shakespeare Institute, said that Elizabethan drama was known for being gruesome: "The English drama was notorious for on-stage deaths; they were thought crass. For neo-classical critics, deaths should be off-stage."

Should Crouch and his cast deploy the deaths in the order in which they were written, The Complete Deaths will get far more interesting beyond the interval. Crouch said: "The first history plays are quite rudimentary in how to snuff out a life, but he has a more sophisticated means of killing people as the plays go on.

"There is some extraordinarily exquisite stuff, the smothering of Desdemona, Cleopatra putting an asp to her breast, the suicides in Julius Caesar with Brutus asking each of the men individually if they will hold a sword while he runs on to it."

To help keep track, a set of Top Trump-style cards is being produced to accompany the production, ranking each play in terms of fairness, pitiability, gore and final words.