“Hastings’ performance is complicated and heart-rending”
As the audience files in, we’re initially greeted with a collage of screens playing wholesome random snippets- a merry-go-round, a dance troupe, pastries rising in the oven, a man juggling for the entertainment of a fluffy rodent- while ‘The Moon Belongs to Everyone’ plays on repeat. As soon as the lights dim, however, the screens switch to a news report about a bomb used in Vietnam. This is pretty much the order for the evening, splicing seemingly innocuous memories and feelings with deeply disturbing information. In a nutshell, “While I was at senior prom, I didn’t know my mom was being strangled.”
It’s hard to pin down a single narrative or message. Everything seems to be linked for writer and performer Rhys Hastings, but it’s impossible to unpick, or even understand everything being thrown at us. Hastings appears to be both trying to work through his trauma, as well as being completely immobilised by it; by telling his story he hopes that it heals something, but equally in remembering it all, he’s only reliving it.
According to the programme notes, this is supposed to be an exploration of ‘safe spaces’, but really it seems to be saying there’s no such thing, particularly in the world of creativity.
Hastings’ performance is complicated and heart-rending. It’s hard to know quite how autobiographical this story is, but either way, his character presents as confused and confusing: trying to be a good person, failing a lot, trying to work out what that even means.
Directed by Nastazja Domaradzka, Caceroleo is daring and brilliantly aggressive in its execution, placing the audience in the centre of a tornado with little to no explanation. It’s both hard to watch and hard to look away, and I leave the venue feeling confused myself, and not a little fragile.
“a workable and reasonably successful ensemble production”
This production from Lazarus Theatre Company reduces Shakespeare’s longest play to a concise one hundred minutes, performed without an interval, by axing all the adult characters. No Claudius, no Gertrude, no Polonius…
The work was initially created as part of an actor in training programme, and the production fails to escape these origins. It still looks and feels like an actor’s workshop rather than a finished piece of theatre. Part of this is deliberate: the setting is an unspecified young person’s space: part drama studio, part therapy group, part corrective training establishment.
The theatre space (Designer Sorcha Corcoran) is stripped back to its black walls exposing the lighting bars, the floor is scuffed with just some fresh blue lines marking zonal space providing some colour. A circle of blue plastic chairs and two props cabinets are the only set. The lighting (Designer Stuart Glover) is often blue too giving some ambience, whilst brighter light from the side bars causes shadowing issues.
An ensemble of nine actors is summoned into the circle by the ringing of a bell. Everyone is dressed in blue sweatshirts, tracksuit bottoms and training shoes. Each is invited to tell their story by an unknown amplified voice (Micha Colombo). This is the method by which Shakespeare’s plot is moved forward; at key moments the voice informs the young people of activities by the missing adults, or of offstage action not seen (“Hamlet has killed Polonius”). The amplified voice becomes an unseen presence with characters looking fearfully upwards, knowing that everything they do is observed. Is this voice then a helpful counsellor or Big Brother?
Central to almost every scene, Hamlet (Michael Hawkey) dominates the action. The remaining ensemble is pushed to the cramped sidelines, slightly but not completely out of the light. Hawkey grows into his role as the play progresses, but the need for speed often impairs the clarity of his diction. Noise from the wind machine and electronic sound effects mask the spoken word in the appearance of old Hamlet’s ghost – although Horatio (Alex Zur) boasts some fine vocal quality – and the occasional use of a handheld microphone with its inherent pops and bangs jars, particularly in Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy. The effectiveness of choral speaking during the Ghost scene is also marred by the amplified sound.
Director Ricky Dukes keeps the actors primarily at a distance as if intimacy between them is not permissible. Hamlet interrogates Rosencrantz (Amber Mendez-Martin) and Guildenstern (Raj Swamy) from the full width of the stage, and again when Hamlet berates Ophelia (Lexine Lee) with “Get thee to a nunnery”. Lee plays her role in an effectively calm manner. When she leaves the stage pursued by a handheld camera, TV screens show her movement through the backstage corridors to her untimely and bloody end in a toilet cubicle.
A comic Players’ scene (Kiera Murray and Juan Hernandez) is nicely done and Kalifa Taylor shines in her lone dramatic rendition. Laertes (Sam Morris) lacks sufficient anger on hearing of Ophelia’s fate but a slowmo sword fight (Fight Direction Alice Emery) between him and Hamlet provides an effective way of staging the final scene.
What is achieved then in this radical rethink of how to present Hamlet is a series of vignettes held together by the framing device of the Voice. This cast, the majority of whom are appearing in their first professional production, all require a little more polish and the production is rather rough around the edges. Considering the loss of so many key roles, though, Lazarus has produced, perhaps surprisingly, a workable and reasonably successful ensemble production.
