You’re handed a glossy brochure when queuing for Escaping Hamlet, detailing the credentials of the cast and the British and Italian companies that have collaborated here, immediately suggesting that this production is a cut above many of the plays premiered at the Fringe. The performance does indeed display high production values and assured performances, but Natalia Capra’s script provides an odd, ineffable experience that will no doubt divide audiences.
This is less an adaptation of Hamlet than an experimental piece stretched over the bare bones of Shakespeare’s play; characters and events are torn from the source play’s plot to evoke very new themes, meanings are suggested by the ambivalent space between the two plays. Capra’s script reminds you of the American writer Kathy Acker’s approach to plagiarising canonical texts. Like Acker, Escaping Hamlet degrades Shakespeare’s wordplay into anti-poetic language, employing repetition, tautology and references to popular-culture. The play is wilfully anachronistic, one character suggesting, ‘let’s talk about philosophy, like in a Chekhov play’; and references to philosophy and literary theory give Escaping Hamlet the self-aware sheen of much contemporary art.
Hamlet’s the perfect play to feed into this kind of comment on theatre and acting: expanding on Shakespeare’s play-within-a-play, Capra makes all the characters wannabee actors, and questions whether Hamlet’s temperament means he’d be more suited to the stage than reality. The play provokes thoughts about art’s lack of political significance in the modern world; the uncertainty of translation and source texts; and evocatively echoes Beckett, blind Tiresias and the Wizard of Oz. There’s also cheesy jokes and physical comedy added into the highly eccentric mix.
Definitely one for fans of thought-provoking theatre and ardent Shakespeare buffs. However, in the category of ‘arty works that take Shakespeare as a starting point at this year’s Fringe’, Escaping Hamlet doesn’t have the brilliant moral force or spectacle of Biuro Podrozy’s Macbeth: Who is that Bloodied Man? – the latter should be your first choice.
3/5
Steve Howard
