Out of chaos comes order, at least so we like to think, when as poets we take random lumps of experience and shape them with words into some sort of coherence; when as managers we take scruffy little units of productivity and mould them into teams of efficiency and corporate loyalty; when as politicians we strive to fit the inner vision on the outer scene by lopping off the awkward bits of the latter. But such idealism is subject to crude reality, to the incapacity of a changeable and definitely not ideal world to cope with perfection.
So, when James Joyce, who was crammed full of ideas, put 1+2+3 together he guessed that they did not really add up because, when all is said and done, in Hamlet, the very work of art that purports to conjoin the artist (Hamlet – remember, he never actually does anything), the manager (Polonius, Colin to his friends, who is obsessed with systems) and the politician (Claudius, who has a penchant for poison and other people’s property) into a sweet and satisfying completeness, something smelt very wrong. Like that sentence, it just went on too long.
To cut a long story short, it was stolen property, bereft of its essential integrity, wholeness, symmetry, radiance and that little moment of blinding light. Art tainted with politics. So your man steps in, personally, in an attempt to reassert the primacy and integrity of the artistic process by reconstituting the identity of Hamlet (Shakespeare’s spiritual son) into its proper shape as Hamnette (his wife’s spiritual daughter) and to discover whether the principle that determines its shape is comic or tragic. With art, you see, as with management and politics, you never know until the end of the story whether to laugh or cry.
We have, then, epic conflicts that resound through every degree of concreteness and abstraction: mother and daughter, husband and wife, innocence and corruption, justice and ambition, order and accident, art and politics.
Cast and crew
Director
Harry LoveCast
Hamnette - Emily DuncanGertrude - Ruth Wheeler
2nd Devil, Ophelia, Tony, - Justine Pierre
Old Hamlet, 1st Devil, Fa - Geoff Lambourne
Dr Blossom, Charles - Geoff Lambourne
Claudius - Chris Horlock
Joyce, Rosenstern - Andrew Patterson
2nd Sentry, Emmanuel - Jessica Little
Ernest - Harry Love
Dream Devils - Abby Aitken
Dream Devils - Eve Aitken
Dream Devils - Megan Findlay
Dream Devils - Winnie Nichol
Crew
Stage Manager - Joe SpencerSet Construction/Properti - Andrew Cook
Costumes - Roz McKechnie
Lighting - Ben Vickers
Lighting - Lyndon Hood
Sound - Maeve Lonie
Incidental Keyboard Music - Brian Beresford
Front of House - Alison Finigan
Poster Design - Martin Fisher
Slides - Jill Davidson
Video - Jayashree Panjabi
Video - Hayley Lye
Video - Wayne Chettleburgh
Video - Caleb Thomson
Video - Rhys Walker
Babysitting - Catherine Madill