This
is a revised version of a piece written for artsHub.
When I was twelve,
my parents took me to see The Complete Works of
William Shakespeare (Abridged), and even though I didn’t get all the
jokes and references, I fell in love with the craziness, the silliness, and the
sheer fun that the show revelled in and celebrated. To this day, I still
maintain that your first serious exposure to Shakespeare (sometimes as a child)
is how you see him and his work throughout life. Over the past number of years,
there have been various productions which have come close to embracing the same
sort of silliness and irreverence which the Reduced Shakespeare Company ushered
in, and it is always a delight to revel in each production’s new take on the
Bard.
While the rest of
the world tries to out-do each other in the Most Reverent Homage To
Shakespeare’s Legacy award to celebrate Shakespeare’s 400th death-day, The Listies – along with
their friends at Sydney Theatre
Company – have mounted a production entitled Hamlet:
Prince of Skidmark no less, which somehow manages to embrace
Shakespeare’s play (and all its variants) and the kind of mindset often found
in children aged five to ten, and pulls it off with enough fart jokes and
theatrical magic (as well as a healthy dose of chaos) to make you feel like a
kid again.
The Listies – Richard
Higgins & Matt Kelly – are a formidable duo of clowns and goofballs. While
Higgins plays the straight-man, the purist intent on performing Hamlet as it was written, Kelly is
hell-bent on derailing that plan and seizes every opportunity for mayhem with
relish and almost-too-much delight. We first see them as ushers, in blue and
gold uniforms, chaotically directing people to their seats before ushering each
other onto the stage, where it is revealed the cast of the intended production
of Hamlet have got food-poisoning
from a four-hundred year old block of mouldy cheese, and it is up to them (and
to the delight of the younger members of the audience) to save the day. Higgins
plays Hamlet, while Kelly plays almost everyone else, with the help of
quick-change costumes (at one point he wears a dress around his neck, with the
coat hanger still attached)!
Cavorting
around Renée
Mulder’s cardboard-box-esque set with costumes that traverse everything
from Elizabethan doublet-and-hose to fluoro plastic ponchos and fake beards,
director Declan
Greene (of Sisters
Grimm fame) keeps the drama and the humour developing in a suitably
Shakespearean fashion, and makes sure the production is more than simply a set
of loosely connected sketches. Enlisting the help of the formidable Olga
Miller, the (now) trio set off through Shakespeare’s Hamlet cutting it up into the big speeches and big moments, cutting
out the minor characters (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are relegated to a brief
appearance as croissants), and cutting straight to the audience participation,
big laughs, and even bigger messes. Yet, despite the silliness, there are still
enough poignant moments here so you don’t truly miss the Shakespearean
original, even if they are (ever-so-slightly) undermined by Egyptian cotton
sheets and dry-ice cannons.
If
you’ve ever wished Hamlet – and
indeed Shakespeare – had more ninjas, zombies, Nunjas (ninja-nuns),
space-pirates, exploding ears, fart and poo jokes, intergalactic adventures,
and dinosaurs; if you’ve ever wished Ophelia had more to do and say; if you’ve
ever wished Shakespeare’s plays made sense in the way a ten-year-old’s mind
does, then this is most certainly the play for you.
Before too long,
the stage is covered in goo, silly-string, aliens, fluorescent vomit, and all
manner of chaos, and the some of the audience have to be prevented from joining
in on-stage. Adults will find it hard not to laugh; kids will find it hard not
to laugh; the actors find it hard not to laugh. In short, if you’re not
laughing, you soon will be.
Reminiscent at
times of Andy Griffiths’ Just
Macbeth! for Bell Shakespeare in 2010, this is Hamlet with everything you could have wanted and more, and it’s the
perfect way to introduce a young person to the magic and chaos of theatre, as
well as to the work of Shakespeare. Perhaps the next generation of
theatre-chaoticians are sitting in these audiences waiting for that lightbulb
moment…
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