Carriageworks, January 16
9/10
What to do when “H” is coursing through your veins, and you constantly crave more? Where to go? If the “H” stands for Hamlet rather than heroin, help is at hand. Ex-Hamlets can attend Hamlet Camp, a rehabilitation facility for those poor souls who’ve play-acted the Dane, and since that day have never been quite sane.
Conceived by Brendan Cowell, and written, directed and performed by Cowell, Ewen Leslie and Toby Schmitz, Hamlet Camp is January’s highlight. Played in the round on a bare stage in a smallish space, it spotlights performance rather than director-driven conceptions. Part of the point, in fact, is to poke fun at directors who will not let well enough alone; who forget “the play’s the thing”.
It begins with poems penned and delivered by each actor. Autobiographical, each is bravely candid and brilliantly performed, drawing us in, not to people who played Hamlet, but to people whom Hamlet consumed. Schmitz’s Skip Retail Therapy looks back at his time selling second-hand books, a world so far from reality that a customer could ask for “the non-fiction fantasy”. Cowell’s Storage tells of disencumbering his life to move to London, and discovering his hired storage unit gave him his greatest sense of home. Leslie’s rhyming Ship to Shore is about becoming an actor, that fateful calling demanding “the thickest skin with an open heart”. Claudia Haines-Cappeau then performs a little dance as Ophelia, and much later returns as a fourth (“she/her”) Hamlet.
Now in asylum garb, Cowell returns as Stephen, Schmitz as Marcus and Leslie as Cameron. The latter, the latest to be committed, still maintains he’s Hamlet, a stage the others have outgrown. But something is rotten in the state of their treatment. To be cruel only to be kind, every time they begin to quote from Hamlet they receive an electric shock to the neck. “To be” becomes a dangerous way to start a sentence. Despite this ever-present threat, they compare their forays into this pinnacle of psychological and philosophical insight. Poor Cameron was condemned to play all the roles in a cine-theatre production, while Stephen’s director had a bet each way, incorporating both swords and mobile phones.
Along the way a disembodied voice tells them it’s time for such compulsory workshops as “Off-Stage Women” or “Breathing”. Cameron must also be “purged” of believing he’s Hamlet, a semi-surgical operation the others have already survived.
But ultimately, there is no recovery. There’s the rub: once hooked, you’re hooked for life – except that you become too old to play the role: the predicament in which they now find themselves. If that sounds glum, the show’s actually wildly funny, these three fellows of infinite jest volleying off one another in hugely engaging fashion, and enjoying the therapy of an excuse to revisit the great Dane. Well, almost. Brevity being the soul of wit, it flashes past in 90 minutes. The rest is silence.
Until January 25.