.jpg)
Michael Cox reviews the American production that's part of this year's Edinburgh International Festival.
There’s a great idea behind The Wooster Group’s production of Hamlet (***). They have unearthed a filmed Broadway production from 1964 that screened only twice in cinemas and starred Richard Burton. Projected on a large screen in the back, the company re-enact the action, along with snippets from other cinematic versions of Hamlet.
The result is a production that is much more interesting in concept than execution. Anyone who’s seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show in a cinema with fans acting before the screen will have a good idea what to expect—the cast seem much keener in mirroring the film than in playing their parts.
It is odd how tech and live performance don’t quite happily collide here. In fact, at times they are in conflict as the film didn’t always co-operate. Whether this was intentional or not is immaterial: if this production does anything it proves that a recording is at best a tame alternative to a live performance.
Odder still is the fact that the two most successful moments don’t come from the Burton film at all but from two more recent Hamlets: Bill Murray’s Polonius giving fatherly advice and Charlton Heston’s rousing performance as the Player King are both terrific moments to watch, and these two uses of combined film and live theatre are riveting and prove the theatre company are on to a good idea.
Too bad then that most of the production comes nowhere near capturing the sheer energy of these two short scenes in the rest of its nearly three hour running time. In the end, Hamlet proves a frustrating experience: it would have been preferable watching one or the other rather than a three-hour sport for dominance.
Hamlet has completed its run.
RSS