Hamlet Further Afield!

We are venturing out of the Faithful City to our closest metropolis!  We are delighted to announce that we are taking Hamlet to the Lamp Tavern in Digbeth (157 Barford Street, Digbeth, Birmingham, B5 6AH) on Saturday 28th and Sunday 29th April at 7.30pm.  Tickets are available on the door or to reserve on 07903 339669.  We are so happy to take the Melting Pot magic as far afield as possible.  We want to spread the love!

Shakespeare – Folios, Quartos and conspiracies

One of our company is fascinated by the original text sources for Hamlet. The text as we know it – from the Penguin edition or whatever – comes down to us from three printed editions, two printed during Shakespeare’s lifetime and one from very shortly after. The two from during his life are called quartos, and the one from shortly after is known as the “first folio”. Quarto and folio are just paper sizes – quarto is a small pocket size and folio is like a big hardback. If it was now we would probably call them the A5 version and the A4 version. The “first folio” is effectively the first edition of what we now know as the Complete Works of Shakespeare.

There are only 8 or 9 copies of the quarto editions still around, but not a page survives of Shakespeare’s hand-written originals – that’s if you ignore a single speech written to insert into a play by someone else. The play is about Sir Thomas More, and the speech might just be written by Shakespeare, and if so it is his handwriting on a page in the British Library, which is quite exciting. But apart from this, nothing survives except the printed editions. This of course has fuelled many conspiracy theories that Shakespeare didn’t write the plays at all. But it’s not so very surprising - there’s not a single page from most of the other playwrights of the time either – Marlowe, Middleton and the rest. Paper just didn’t tend to survive – partly because it was hard to come by, so once it had been used it was used again, for shopping lists or whatever. Also there were an awful lot of fires in those days – the Globe theatre burnt down, no doubt taking a lot of playscripts with it. Then came the great fire of London in 1666 which probably accounted for many more valuable documents!

By the way, it’s always assumed that Shakey went to Stratford-on-Avon Grammar school. But all the records of the school were also destroyed by fire in the 1590s. So we don’t even know that for sure.

Anyway, the text of the folio edition is available online. We downloaded it – to make sure we were using the right words – and copied it into Microsoft Word. At this point Word came up with a warning - “there are too many spelling mistakes and grammatical errors to display in this document”!

Health and Safety to the rescue

 

Shakespeare plays often put challenging physical demands on actors. An actor playing King Lear, for example (who won't be in the first flush of youth, by the way), has to scale the emotional heights and plumb the depths and then at the end, in the most heart-wrenching scene of all, walk on carrying the body of his youngest daughter, Cordelia. One famous actor – I think it was Ralph Richardson – when asked the most important thing when playing Lear, replied “a light Cordelia”.

Hamlet is well known among actors for being very long and tiring then having an exciting, and very exhausting, swordfight at the end. Well,  our version is not that long. We've kept all the scenes and all the characters but we've trimmed them to fit the small scale spaces we’re playing them in so we won’t be keeping you more than two-and-a-bit hours (it’s shorter than either Titanic or Avatar but is also 3D– and cheaper). But we still have to do the swordfight. (And in our production the actor playing Hamlet isn’t in the first flush of youth either, by the way).

In keeping with the style of the production we think we've found a fun way of doing it. It doesn't involve anything sharp – that would be impossible in the Arthouse because the audience are too close for comfort, or for that matter safety. So this time health and safety has inspired us rather than held us back - to do something fun, but effective – we hope! People who’ve seen it think it works really well – come along and let us know.

Just who is Hamlet, really?

We've christened the famous 'nunnery scene', between Hamlet and Ophelia at the end of the first half, the 'nunnery wood scene' - in recognition of the country park on the outskirts of Worcester - a good place for a Sunday afternoon wander on an early Spring day!

Been thinking about the misogyny in Hamlet (and, arguably throughout Shakespeare) - is Hamlet the hero, anti-hero or the Everyman figure?  This sounds a bit like an A Level English question!  but it is one that the actor (and director) have to tackle, one way or another.  Who is he?  why does he act like he does?  Why, at the end of the play, when (Spoiler Alert!) he dies, are we all bereft, when he has behaved so badly/oddly/madly?  Hamlet has to be likeable and engaging or the play won't work.  You don't want to watch a spoilt child having a tantrum for 2 hours.  He treats everyone pretty badly, is rude to his mother and the way he treats Ophelia in Nunnery Wood, is frankly unpleasant.

Directors/actors are often tempted to add a bit of roughing up in this scene but does violence against women really belong here?  Perhaps it's more important to work out what's going on.  Hamlet seems angry and cruel and yet Ophelia exclaims 'what a noble mind is here o'erthrown'  She sees his behaviour from another angle and, believes it crucially very out of character and different to the relationship they had had before.  A tender relationship in which Hamlet had given her gifts and love tokens.  And yet..'get thee to a nunnery' - that's quite clear!  Is his new behaviour part of a plan?  We think, after much thought, rehearsal and discussion, we are approaching one interpretation.  We are very aware it is one among many....we welcome your responses when you come to see the play!  Let's have a chat and a drink after...

casting - such fun!

We were really struggling to cast Ophelia for our production.  To use the posh phrase, it's a cross gender cast or, to put it another way, Polonius and Laertes are both "breeches roles".  Also, everyone is playing multiple characters - so the actor playing Ophelia is playing Rosencrantz, Osric and Fortinbras.  And Laertes also plays Guildenstern, Barnardo and the captain.

This means girls playing boys and boys playing girls..so why not a boy for Ophelia? It's what Shakespeare would have done, after all!  but we couldnt find a boy for Ophelia....back to the gender-bending drawing board..then Holly dropped into our laps and Ophelia etc was cast.  Phew, we all thought, now we are set.  Then our Laertes left...uh, oh, what to do now?

Back to square one.  Then we realised that our Gertrude (Amanda - also producer and director) had always wanted to don breeches and brush up her stage fighting so...we shifted her to Laertes (only a new set of lines and moves to learn, no problem!) and then we needed a Gertrude.  That was easy - we talked to Jenny Stokes (already known as Dolly Grip and many heavyweight roles in The Crucible, All My Sons and Six Characters in Search of an Author) and she agreed to do it.  Fully cast and under way!  Full speed ahead now and cooking with gas! (metaphors as mixed as the casting!)