Jack McGee
Jo Marsh and The Magnificent Weirdos’ ambitious new staging of Hamlet with its striking tagline (One Hour. Three Actors. Denmark will never be the same) and techno-thriller poster (designed by Hamish Boyle based on Marsh’s outlines), promises a take on the prince that's more Ethan Hawke than Kenneth Branagh. Set in a “crumbling, dystopian world filled with surveillance and conspiracies”, projection design (by SPLITelevison) is infused into the very core of the show. It’s as ambitious as it sounds. Pushing a shoe-string BATS budget to its limit, Marsh and her team are shooting for the moon, without cutting any corners for accessibility. It’s a hard show not to root for, even if it doesn’t always rise to its lofty goals.
One Hour.
Marsh’s adaptation of the play (supported with dramaturgy by Sameena Zehra) is lean and efficient. With a deft scalpel, she trims the play down to its paranoid core. While some more die-hard Shakespeare heads might miss the more sprawling, political, populated world of the original play - I think Marsh makes a strong case for a more intimate, focussed, staging. It feels like an artistic choice, not a budgetary one. Nor does it feel like a greatest hits adaptation, with Yorick’s skull nowhere to be seen (alas). What is kept in, is kept in for a reason. As she attests in the program, this approach allows her to focus on watching the core relationships “blossom and crumble.”
This being said, the “dystopian” world referred to in the program is painted on very lightly. Specifics of time and place are not something this show evokes in me. This isn’t inherently an issue, but there’s a tension in the show aspiring for it.
As we enter the space, surveillance footage of a person on some non-specific steps (that look suspiciously like Toi Poneke’s…) is projected onto a large screen of white cloth. Later in the show this screen splits into two squares, which raise, and rotate into diamonds; It’s spectacular, but this is the only time it’s used to give us a sense of the outside world. Otherwise it’s used almost entirely for video calls (along with some wonderfully menacing footage of the ghost). Lighting design is sparse, and BATS’s classic black floor makes every scene feel like it exists outside of space, leaving us with something that feels like a half measure - half a design, half a set, half a world. With two narrower, turret-like, screens at the back of the stage, the show is begging for more surveillance footage and a more elaborate projection design, or less.
This is the complexities of ambition. It’s hard to imagine that the team didn’t have more ideas for projection, it’s harder to imagine them being able to afford it. As artists, do we limit ourselves to what we have the means to execute fully or do we leave our audiences to fill in those blanks for us? A case could be made that the design of the show would be stronger if it played only to its strengths. Equally, you could say that the whole point of BATS is to ignore and shatter those limitations. Acknowledging that these are unfortunate choices we’re all forced to make by a system that doesn’t value its artists, it is something to think about.
Three Actors
The titular prince is played by film and theatre director Shaun Swain (Blackout). The remaining characters are spread between two performers - playwright and novelist Helen Vivienne Fletcher (Confessions of a Sleepwalking Insomniac), and actor Hamish Boyle (Your Body is a Wasteland). It’s a credit to all three performers, along with Marsh and Zehra, that at every point in this show, it’s clear that the characters understand what they are saying. Performance intent is never an issue, which is a common pitfall in stagings of the Bard. That doesn’t mean however, that the performances always feel organic.
Boyle is the clear standout. He manages to achieve the magic trick of getting us to understand the meaning of every word he’s saying, without having to distance ourselves from the emotion of the play to stop and think about them. Watching him feels like watching a movie with subtitles. Soon, you forget that you’re reading. While he effortlessly embodies many of the show's larger, more comedic characters, the highlight for me is his performance as King Claudius, where he succeeds in gaslighting the audience. He portrays the king as charismatic, somewhat affable, exuding an air of responsibility. He’s so effective in this, that at points we find ourselves questioning if he’s really so bad. Sure, he murdered the king to get here, but he seems to be doing a good job of it now, right? Hamlet is being such a whiny nuisance, he might be right, but it’d be so much easier for everyone if he didn’t rock the boat… Sinister.
One of the big questions in any staging of Hamlet, is how mentally unwell should the titular prince be played. In some stagings, it’s purely a performance, a way to test Claudius, all the way to the end. In others, he’s fully unravelling - even the existence of his father’s ghost can be questioned. Swain’s Hamlet appears more on the unstable end of things, without descending into generic theatrical madness. It’s a largely withdrawn performance, with big flurries of energy and fury towards the end. To a certain extent, he’s Hamlet as a conspiracy theorist - isolated, withdrawn, untrusting, slowly slipping further and further away from his loved ones until it’s too late. Of course, as opposed to conspiracy theorists, he’s right. While it’s a well realised performance, Swain is never able to quite make it feel lived in. He’s making compelling choices, but we’re always conscious that he’s actively making them.
In order to get around only having three performers, Boyle and Vivienne Fletcher frequently “video call” into a scene. Pre-recorded footage of them is projected up on a screen, for the actors on stage to converse with. This is used to various effects. At one point in the show, the two characters calling in mute their mics and turn off their video. One character is aware they’re being watched, and communicates that subtextually to another. It’s tense, it’s paranoid, it’s clever. Often, however, the calling in feels purely like a solution to a staging restriction, and not an active benefit to the show. Performing both on a pre-recorded video call and against one is a brutal task. Timings are difficult, and even though it appears that the AV team have found a creative way to use a digital glitch effect to help make queuing easier, keeping the energy up is no small feat. Regularly, the show's momentum will slow drastically when a character has to have a conversation with the projector.
Vivienne Fletcher gets the rough end of this stick. With the exception of a fused Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, she has more withdrawn characters to play than Boyle. These really suffer in the projected scenes where she doesn’t have another performer to play against. Unfortunately, Ophelia’s arc - one debatably already under-explored in the original play - struggles to fully connect, largely as a result of the character having a core scene locked to the screen. It’s clear the show is interested in her grief and the choices that lead to her suicide, but we’re never quite let in on them. Fletcher is a very mannered performer, and occasionally her characters blend together, speaking in the same tone. There are moments where she pushes past this, such as with her furious Laertes, but I often find myself dependent on the show's (very clever) costume clues to differentiate between her characters.
Denmark Will Never Be the Same
I want to shout out the excellent accessibility support developed for this. As always, Marsh makes a point of prioritising this, with Audio Description, a live-streamed captioned performance, a relaxed matinee, and a touch tour available, along with a lengthy and detailed show info doc.
It’s always fascinating to see a staging of a classic play at BATS, and this is no exception. There’s a unique tension here - it’s rare to see a show that’s both this mature and measured, while simultaneously being this ambitious and rough around the edges. Overall, I’m more excited by its ideas than its execution, but I'm still very excited. The runway is open for future development, and I think this proves there’s a real place for creative and accessible, but still adult, stagings of classic works here in Te Whanganui-a-Tara.
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