Our last show of the trip has come and gone! I am so happy and honored that it is Hamlet. It is my favorite Shakespeare and has a lot of personal significance to me, so getting to see it performed live for the first time was everything I could’ve asked for. This was different from anything we saw here, and honestly, different than anything I have really ever heard about or seen outside our trip. This show interwove songs from Radiohead to tell the story, and at one point had the actors on stage singing some of the songs from the show. But I am getting ahead of myself! Let go from the top!
First, I had about as good of a seat as I could’ve asked for in terms of the ones that we were all given. I was the very last seat of the first row of the circle, so I was sitting on stage right facing the “side” of the thrust stage. On the stage were a bunch of heavy coats that at the start of the show flew out. There were two floors to the set, and at the bottom of the lower floor were windows with musicians who were playing the music live. The second floor took up the entire rest of the stage and was a 20-foot tall screen that had speakers and soundproofing material on it. The visuals that were on that screen were stunning. There were three doors in the upper story, and two singers came out of the two side doors and sang during the transactions. Speaking of transitions, they were some of the most well utilized transitions I had ever seen. The show was 1 hour 40 minutes instead of the normal 3-hour production that Hamlet is, so in order to cut scenes but show what was cut to keep the story flowing and making sense, they had the actors briefly act out their interactions in one to two movements. I am not doing it justice with my description but trust that it was great. There was a really minimal set, only a few speakers which acted as stools and stands, and then a few props here and there, which were all red when they came onto the stage. The only two I remember were the megaphone Hamlet uses during his scene with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern where they see him as mad, and then the cup that Gertrude drinks out of at the end of the show. Oh, and the dagger that most of the people die by. But there wasn’t much else.
I want to touch on some scenes I love! The “to be or not to be scene” was done in a way that Hamlet was saying it to Ophelia while they are being listened in on, so they mushed those two scenes together. It really worked. Then, when Ophelia is about to die, they have her say the monologue and it has a delayed echo through the whole theater and it was AMAZING. Also with Ophelia and Hamlet, the first scene they are in together has very few words, and was just them goofy dancing together, it was probably my favorite scene in the show because the chemistry was crazy but so was the simplicity and believability of the scene. I should now say that the acting was everything and more. There was not one actor who was a weak link, and I struggled to find a show in my memory where that was not the case. Our Hamlet was very similar to Adam Scott’s Hamlet in terms of delivery and tone, but had his own spin to it, as well as youth, that made it also phenomenal.
All in all, I loved that this was our last show. We have seen so much theater in this last month, and I am grateful to have seen such a wide range and variety.
Theatre in London U of A 