Theatre review: Fat Ham

After Hamlet on the Titanic and a musical version set to Radiohead* the RSC has its third go at the story this year: I've not got the best history with the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, having found a number of past winners underwhelming at best, but in general it still seems to be a respected award, so James Ijames' 2022 winner must have made for one of the few times actors have actively wanted to be called Fat Ham. Fat Ham, I hear it and I know, Fat Ham, Fat Ham, I know you wanna take me home, Fat Ham, and get to know me close, Fat Ham, Fat Ham, when your heart goes Fat Ham is a self-aware, modern-day adaptation of Hamlet that takes the "ham" part of the title (and, I guess, the Danish part of the story) and turns the royal family into one that's made a living out of pork products, raising pigs, butchering them and cooking them in their restaurant.

Theatre review: Fangirls

Turns out July is the month of imported shows about 14-year-old girls kidnapping celebrities, as the Lyric Hammersmith hosts the UK premiere of Australian musical Fangirls. Yve Blake's (book, music and lyrics) show centres on fans of a fictional boyband star whose similarity to any real persons living or dead is, I'm sure, purely coincidental: Harry (Thomas Grant) auditioned for a British talent show that turned him down for being too young to compete solo, but instead put him in a manufactured boyband that went on to conquer the world (my lowkey favourite gag in the show was the band being called Heartbreak Nation, which is such an accurately half-hearted combination of two random words for a manufactured X Factor boyband.) Edna (Jasmine Elcock) is a Sydney teenager who spends hours on her computer reading and writing Harry fanfic.