This is a fun night of theatre, one we’re privileged to share with three contemporary legends as they muse on the dramatic form.
It’s also a tantalising potpourri.
It begins with Toby Schmitz, Brendan Cowell and Ewen Leslie each performing a self-written monologue. Schmitz’s monologue is about an actor currently working in a second-hand book store in Newtown; still a purveyor of art, but in rather reduced circumstances: tale teller now retailer. Cowell’s monologue explores how the actor’s life of perpetual rootlessness impacts their relationship with material objects. Leslie’s presents the journey of an out-of-his-depth child TV actor to maturity as a lover of the craft. Each monologue is richly poetic and very funny.
Are they autobiographical? Sort of. I guess. I don’t know. Truth is certainly tempered by poetic licence and the hyperbolic needs of humour. I did take away the sense that the character being presented in each piece was a moderately successful actor. What a disparate, contradictory, explosive mix of words that is! It also operates as a suitable tonal introduction to the madcap comedy that follows.
That’s because – after Claudia Haines-Cappeau’s beautifully evocative dance as Ophelia – there comes the title piece, an extended skit in which three actors who’ve played Hamlet are now going through rehab. It’s written by Schmitz, Cowell and Leslie, three actors who’ve played Hamlet and are now…
If the monologues might be autobiographical, the skit certainly isn’t – at least not if read as realism. It is, however, a puckish peep into the weirdly overwhelming experience that playing the Dane apparently is. As suggested, the play’s the thing.
Or can rehab help them realise that it’s just a thing? One thing among many.
The skit is terrifically amusing, a wonderful opportunity for three great comic actors to strut their stuff. It sparkles with insights into what it is to be a performer. (There are plenty of in-jokes about particular past productions, and these are marvellously mischievous, but they don’t dominate.) Frustration is expressed at directors and their determination to own a play by imposing some bizarre idiosyncratic vision. As one recovering Hamlet says, I’d love a director to say ‘Let’s just do the play.’ Also grumbled about are reviewers. Cowell’s character is disturbed that one reviewer described his Hamlet as mercurial. This observation hints at the sensitivity of performers, but it also left me wondering if the greatest tragedy in theatre is not Hamlet, but that reviews are taken seriously.
Another provocative observation is that we romanticise Hamlet, which I took to mean we overvalue both the character and the performance of that character. One of the sessions at the rehab centre is entitled Offstage Women. It seems to refer to the play’s representation of women and how Hamlet himself mistreats them. It also refers, I think, to how male actors lost in the role mistreat the women in their own lives. I make no comment about the impact playing the famous protagonist might have on an actor’s personal relationships, but I find fascinating the suggestion that audiences are asked to admire Hamlet. Perhaps an actor needs to find that connection, but as an audience member I’m more than happy to dislike a protagonist or, more precisely, to hold such a personal response to a character in abeyance. (Perhaps, like the suspension of disbelief, it’s the key to a mature appreciation of fiction.) Take Macbeth and, to a lesser degree, Lear: the achievement of these tragedies is that we’re presented a monster yet, beneath all, we still see their humanity. (I admit this probably doesn’t accurately describe what’s happening in, say, Othello or Romeo & Juliet – so perhaps there are audience members out there who do actually like Hamlet as a person.)
That’s the joy of Hamlet Camp, it’s a deliciously playful invitation to thought.
Paul Gilchrist
Hamlet Camp by Brendan Cowell, Ewen Leslie and Toby Schmitz
Presented by Carriageworks and Modern Convict
At Carriageworks until 25 Jan
Image by Daniel Boud
Theatre Red 