Hamlet Camp
Is it the dream/ambition/goal/ of every actor – male or female these days – to play Shakespeare’s tragic hero Hamlet? And if so, has anyone ever been completely content with how they portrayed the Danish Prince? Or are they so haunted by imperfections they saw in their performance that they need to be committed to a specialist unit where aversion therapy is used to cure their persistent preoccupation with the prevaricating Prince – a Hamlet Camp!
A camp of rules and punishments, workshops and meditation, where a ‘Big Sister’-type therapist monitors their behaviour through hidden cameras and electric shocks are administered through implants in their necks if they quote too often from the play!
Only actor/writers like Brendan Cowell, Ewen Leslie and Toby Schmitz could come up with such a bizarre, funny idea, then develop it into an even more bizarre, funny, multilayered, complex script. Only three actors of their expreince and skill could perform it with the pace, tightness … and zaniness … it deserves.
Hamlet Camp is an actors' play. The scenes move quickly. The dialogue is clever, perceptive, sharp, satirical. The relationship between the characters is forceful, knotted, tense. The action is fast, then still, then harried as the characters relive and vindicate their performances, react to the stinging shocks, stand on chairs, run through the audience, writhe on the floor, reach out to each other, then pull away.
It is a mesmerising production, culminating in a complicated, carefully rehearsed, frenzied piece of choreography performed in a space where the audience is close enough to feel the fever of the action – and appreciate the skill, energy and stamina of all three performers.
The play references far more than the challenges of just ‘being Hamlet’. It satirises the many different ‘visions’ of “Hamlet” the actor-patients have played. They have played the unhappy Prince with swords, with phones, with swords and phones, and with cameras. The cunning playwrights also pan directors, stage managers, stage effects, and theatre critics! Very cleverly with quick, astute references that are gently cutting and wryly funny.
Claudia Haines-Capeau plays the voice of the hidden therapist – and appears in the last few moments of the play. She also performs an interpretive dance as Ophelia, offering sprigs of rosemary (“That’s for remembrance”) to the audience as she floats silently around the stage in a short entr’acte after the unusual “curtain raiser” to Hamlet Camp.
Story telling is the forte of the theatre and Cowell, Leslie and Schmitz begin the production with three autobiographical poems.
Toby Schmitz’s Skip Retail Therapy takes us, among other places, to a bookshop and introduces the many different people whose browse its shelves – and his own personal frustrations. Schmitz is the reluctant vendor, caught in a series of part time positions, waiting for the next audition. He moves with grace and tells his story gently, with charm.
Ewen Leslie recalls his teenage acting experiences in his poem Ship to Shore. The audition, the waiting, the surprise of being cast in a TV series, the joy of missing school, then the horror of returning and being “recognised” and bullied. He recalls studying in Western Australia, waiting for roles, travelling to perform them but always being a little haunted by the memories of that first boyhood role. Leslie’s writing is rhythmic and his performance of his memories is beguilingly gentle.
In Storage, Brendan Cowell tells of divesting himself of “stuff” before leaving for England, of being isolated in a basement flat in London during the Covid lockdown where he wrote his novel “Plum”– and finding solace in revisiting his “stuff” in a storage unit on his return. Cowell gave his poem the same intensity and action of all his performances – and the comic timing of which he is a master.
They are, together, an unusual introduction to the wit and satire of the play that follows, yet each of the poems is an insight into the perception and intellect of the three men who envisaged, devised, wrote and performed the zany theatrical dissertation that is Hamlet Camp.
Carol Wimmer
Photographer: Daniel Boud
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