Bell Shakespeare’s latest version of Hamlet has received rave reviews, and now the company are bringing the play to the Northern Rivers for the first time, writes Verandah Magazine’s Georgina Bible.
In a play about how the past can work to corrupt the future, we meet Hamlet – a modern anti-hero. In this production by the Bell Shakespeare Company Hamlet is vulgar, misogynist and cruel whilst being crippled with insecurity and paralysed by inaction in his struggle to gain revenge for his father’s murder.
“Hamlet is one of the most complete experiences theatre can provide – extraordinary poetry, intense passion, dazzling intelligence, terror, casual slaughter, friendship, humanity, great humour and great grief,” says director Damien Ryan. “Shakespeare casts his spell through the sheer scope and grandeur of this story – beginning with a dead man walking and ending with a stage littered with bodies.”
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest…Photo: Daniel Boud.
Hamlet is tormented by the impossibility of his situation – his father dead, his mother Gertrude quickly remarried to his uncle Claudius who has seized the throne, then the discovery – via his father’s ghost – of the truth of his father’s murder by his own brother and the unenviable task of avenging his father. Add a further plot twist of Denmark on the brink of war with Norway and the complication of Ophelia, who dies from the “poison of deep grief at Hamlet’s abandonment, and you have a play that explores the human experience at its most extreme.
In fact, when you think about it, Hamlet is about almost everything – war and power, husbands and wives, death and life, sex and love, friendship and fate – and perhaps most complicated of all, how families do or don’t work.
Off the back of directing the critically acclaimed, award winning Henry V for Bell Shakespeare in 2014, Ryan who has worked with Bell Shakespeare for 14 years as an actor, director, teacher and writer delivers this new production of Hamlet. Josh McConville (Griffin Theatre Company’s The Boys, and Sydney Theatre Company’s Mojo) and rising star Matilda Ridgway (for Sport For Jove’s A Doll’s House) lead the cast of Hamlet.
Cast: Josh McConville, Matilda Ridgway, Sean O’Shea, Doris Younane, Ivan Donato, Michael Wahr, Philip Dodd, Robin Goldsworthy, Julia Ohannessian and Catherine Terracini.
HAMLET
NORPA at Lismore City Hall
Monday 31 August, matinee 11am & 7:30pm
Saturday 29 August, 7:30pm – Sold Out
$22 – $49
Bookings: 1300 066 772 or www.norpa.org.au
Diner and bar open from 6pm before evening shows
Free Q&A with the cast after the performance of Hamlet on Saturday 29 August
