It’s no more than fifteen minutes ago that the actors finished onstage at La Mamma (Melbourne) in The Hamlet Apocalypse and I feel compelled to tell somebody. F!#$!@ing fantastic guys. It’s with a sense of trepidation that you go to see some interpretation of Hamlet because with many, you wonder why they didn’t just do Hamlet... that is to say, the interpretation never gets beyond a change in syntax. With Apocalypse, you get a different play – one that is about a group of (am I that old?), very young performers who gather to rehearse, or perform Hamlet in the last moments of their life. Someone who operates the green light and the noise has decided that when the 10 to 1 countdown happens, their lives are over – I guess that’s the apocalypse. So we see actors face the audience, introduce themselves with their real names, tell us why they want to be actors or what would be the last thing they to do in their life; play out the reality of their lives within the dusty confines of Shakespeare’s play. The reality of their countdown situation continually over-runs the performance of Hamlet - it seems more urgent to speak simply and true than to perform an old play. And yet, the relevance of the ghost wandering, of the truth of love, of the nature of existence which is the meat of Hamlet, is never too far from the present consideration. There is a great convergence of the relations, themes and imagery between the real play and the Shakespeare. Ophelia and Hamlet actually love each other... that is the actors do. The woman playing Laertes and Polonius ‘will never have children’ and the guy playing Claudius says he is ‘not such a bad guy.’ To be honest, I’m a complete old fart, because in the beginning I thought that there was going to be messing with Shakespeare for NO GOOD REASON. But there was... (good reason). What I saw tonight was the dystopia of the ‘now’ generation – handed a world on the edge of death, of the abyss – contemplating the end of it all, contemplating, as Hamlet does, the nature of this life and death. There’s a meaningful twist at the end when Hamlet’s speech is conflated... I’m not checking the source here, but something like, “to sleep, to dream...” cut to “...no more.” A more meaningful contemporary working of the text couldn’t be found. Well, I’ve kind of lost the head of steam now, but having seen a wonderful film on tele last night called Reconstruction from Denmark – a re-work of the Orpheo myth, and now this, I think I’ll just go out and howl at the full moon for a few hours. Wow!
performed by Lloyd Allison-Young, Peta Ward, Katrina Cornwell, Mark Hill, Tora Hylands, Robbie O'Brien.produced by Anniene Stockton
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