Shakespeare’s most ponderous play serves as inspiration for five short performances in this joint community project from Norwich Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Part of the RSC’s Shakespeare Nation project, the pieces have a varied – and often very tangential – link to the source material, including occasional diversions into other plays by the Bard.
But the point here is really more about community engagement with performance and storytelling, and not another retelling of the tragic prince’s tale.
So the opening Prologue, performed outside Stage Two in the not-so sterile promontory of a fire escape come car park owes a bit more to Romeo and Juliet than Hamlet, and features four women echoing lines from both plays while encouraging us to think about the threads that bind us, and to look at each other.
Inside Stage Two we get Green Girl, leaping off from the character of Ophelia to delivery a series of vignettes of much-older female lives. The most striking thing here is the staging: the audience is sat cabaret-style around tables with the cast mostly secreted among them, and one performer sat on a table top. The intimacy would be a challenge to any actor, for the community cast it is doubly impressive.
Something Rotten takes the light relief of gravedigger scene and transforms it into a pantomime-like 10 minutes on climate change. It’s a fun, silly romp and wins the prize for most groan-some soliloquy reference, with Hamlet’s famous existential crisis turned in to a daft pun about bees.
The very Norwich setting of the council chamber at City Hall is the stage for Türk Hamlet, described as a “journey of displacement and a celebration of hopes for the future”. The piece is emotionally raw and performed almost entirely in Turkish, by couple Suat and Deniz Calik.
The final instalment Aham is a dance piece – or really two conjoined performances. The stage outside The Forum plays hosts to a classical Bharatanatyam dance inspired by the marriage of Getrude and Claudius, alongside a more modern dance interpretation of Hamet’s “madness”, with the two groups eventually intermingling.
