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.
