Theatre review: Hamlet: Rotten States

Almost as numerous as productions of Hamlet itself are reinterpretations and reimaginings of Shakespeare's play, and in 6FootStories' Hamlet: Rotten States, the play's the thing - being created on the fly. Will Bridges, Amy Fleming and Jake Hassam are the company of travelling players Hamlet enlists to perform "The Mouse-Trap," the performance that's meant to elicit a guilty response from Claudius, his uncle and the new King of Denmark. But in this version of the story, the script Hamlet has given the actors to perform is unusable gibberish. The ghost of Hamlet's father has to appear to the actors themselves to give them the backstory: How Claudius murdered him then stole his wife and crown. With it now left up to them to bring the secret to light the players decide to rewrite the play from scratch, and the play they end up writing isn't an unsubtle metaphor, but Hamlet itself.

The play, devised by its cast, has the additional conceit of consisting almost entirely of lines from Shakespeare's play itself, repurposed to tell the story from a different perspective; a boldly ambitious format and, for me, what trips the play up.

It probably goes without saying that this riff on Hamlet is aimed at those already familiar with the original play; fortunately for the company that's likely to be most theatregoers, as I doubt anyone who didn't know it already could tell you the story after this. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I'm not sure what 6FootStories' version is actually offering in place of the missing narrative. There's a few digs at actorly pretensions, and a witty design that turns the stage into a rehearsal room decorated with photos of recent Hamlets (David Tennant, Michelle Terry, Biggleswade Gingersnaps,) but otherwise this isn't really an outright comic send-up.

Frustratingly, there are moments when the high concept really works and the repurposed language gains new meaning: Hamlet berating himself for his lack of passion after the Hecuba speech becomes an actor being given notes on his performance; "To be or not to be" is improvised by the cast as they figure out its logical progression; the gravediggers' opening comic dialogue becomes them discovering and debating the plot point that Ophelia's death may or may not have been suicide. But the conceit works for individual scenes, not the whole hour, and the constraint of using Shakespeare's lines for both the players' dialogue as themselves and the play-within-a-play means at times it's unclear which we're in. An idea like this needs constant new twists on its high concept to keep it going, and unfortunately the company doesn't have enough of them.

Hamlet: Rotten States by Will Bridges, Amy Fleming and Jake Hassam, based on Hamlet by William Shakespeare, is booking until the 1st of February at the Hope Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour straight through.

Photo credit: Matthew Koltenborn.