"...The play's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King."
(Act II, Scene 2)
A lot of
things happened in 1997: Blair brought Labour back from the wilderness, the
death of Princess Di unleashed mass hysteria, UK band Radiohead unveiled their
iconic OK Computer album and …erm, I
started working at Goldsmiths.
But something
else happened too. A small Kentish theatre company put on its first ever
production, Moliere’s Tartuffe, at Boughton Monchelsea Place, near Maidstone.
Now, twenty years later, The
Changeling Theatre have begun touring their latest outdoor-theatre production,
that most challenging of Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet, directed by
Rob Forknall who has directed every Changeling show.
In last Wednesday's (19 July) evening open-air staging of Hamlet, Shakespeare’s longest and most quoted of
plays, the backdrop of the towering
Severndroog Castle, deep in South-East
London’s Oxleas Wood, provided a fitting substitute for Elsinore, the Danish
royal castle which quietly broods over the tragic play.
 |
| Setting the scene: Oxleas Wood, Severndroog Castle |
The woodland
setting’s intimacy immersed and enveloped audience members in the play’s
action. Similarly, the evening breeze rustled the leaves of the surrounding
ancient trees in eerily-timed accompaniment to the wandering Ghost of the late
King Hamlet.
The story of
the troubled prince struggling to deal with grief and revenge in the Danish
court, the Changeling Theatre's production triumphantly succeeds in that most
difficult of conundrums – just how do you solve a problem like staging a long
philosophical tragedy, with few laughs, in a summer outdoor setting? The answer
is… brilliantly.
The
production features an excellent cast, creative use of music and scene transitions,
and a clever combination of period and modern costume. The modern world is also
referenced in other witty anachronistic touches – e.g. two characters pausing
for a photo ‘selfie’ on their way out of a scene; and the ‘mad’ Hamlet
expressing his mock-demented state by gleefully sticking stickers on another
character’s back, enlisting the help of a nearby cross-legged child audience
member.
Another
interesting interpretation was borrowing from cinematic visual techniques (only sparingly though - relax!) in which
we had the characters on stage suddenly moving in dramatic slow-motion before casually coming back to ‘normal speed’ again.
The talented young
Manchester School of Theatre-trained actor,
Alex Phelps, convincingly carried
off the famously dense rhetoric and discourse of Hamlet’s many soliloquies
including the Bard’s most famous lines:
“To be or not
to be – that is the question:
Where 'tis
nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,”
(Act III,
Scene 1)
However the
audience, and Hamlet, were enjoyably teased when it came to another set of
well-known lines. The supporting characters persisted in throwing around the
skull, interrupting Hamlet several times from completing his lines:
“Let me see,
Alas…”(*)
and then only
later allowing him:
“…poor Yorick! I knew him Horatio. A fellow
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.”
(Act V, Scene
1)
(*sorry, I
may have mis-remembered the exact break-point here…)
Despite the
play’s serious content, the cast created a charmed and relaxed atmosphere with
one of the characters even camply chivvying people back from the interval with,
“Come on, come on, hurry up, it’s my big solo!”
And was it my
modern feminist imagination or were there some ironic snorts and gasps at the
lines?:
“Frailty, thy name is woman!
……
… a beast that wants discourse of reason
Would have mourn’d longer”
(Act I, Scene
2)
when Hamlet
is berating his not-long-widowed mother for re-marrying so soon after her
husband’s death. Hamlet’s mother Gertrude is played very engagingly by multi-talented LAMDA-trained
Sarah Naughton (in action, photo below) who also
excellently doubles-up later as a comic bawdy character.
Th
e
professional cast also contributed to the excellent ‘soundtrack’ to the
production, arranged by Alex Scott, with many of them taking up various
stringed instruments and a clarinet too.
It may well
have been “madness”, sitting there in a darkened wood at 10pm on an English
evening, “yet there is a method in’t” especially for such an engaging, witty and intelligent production.
(Act II, Scene 2)
This highly-recommended
production continues at various venues around London and Kent ending in the
grand setting of Pembroke Castle, Wales, on 30 August. Tickets obtainable from the
Changeling Theatre website.
Cast
Gertrude - Sarah Naughton
Claudius/Ghost - Michael
Palmer
Polonius/Gravedigger - Bryan Torfeh
Horatio - Bryan Moriarty
Laertes/Player King - Tim Bowie
Rosencrantz/Bernardo - Brandon Plummer
Marcellus/Player Queen - Cary Ryan
Company
Design - Clare Southern
Music - Alex Scott
Assistant Director - Charlotte
Quinney
Casting Director - Suzy Catliff CDG
Assistant Stage Manager - Leonie
Jai Hamilton
Administrator - Dawn Archer
Marketing Director - Jill Hogan
Graphic Design- Dan Bull
Photography - Nic Dawkes
Video - Lukasz Jasiukowicz
Movement - Jessica Rose Boyd
Fight Director - Edward Linard
