With obscuring clay half-masks that could screen the identity of the most familiar faces, and a mixture of well-known South African accents, the Hello Elephant adaptation, Hamlet! makes it difficult to ever again take Shakespeare’s celebrated play seriously.
With obscuring clay half-masks that could screen the identity of the most familiar faces, and a mixture of well-known South African accents, the Hello Elephant adaptation, Hamlet! makes it difficult to ever again take Shakespeare’s celebrated play seriously.
This physical theatre play makes the ironies of the original Hamlet play comically explicit. Hamlet steps on stage with a drooping mouth accentuated by his skew brow. His lack of enthusiasm and melancholic state brings back the all too familiar memories of Hamlet’s long, moping soliloquies read in high school English classes. He sums up his emotions for the rest of the play in two words, “I’m depressed,” amid understanding laughter from the audience.
The voluptuous body movements of Claudius and Gertrude bring out a more sensual aspect of the play, as they engage with the audience through improvisation. Claudius’s character, with his “hey bru” accent, fluidly morphs into the character, Horatio, in a way that makes it difficult to believe the two characters are played by the same performer.
Although there are only three performers impersonating different characters, the use of masks, clothing and accents makes each character unique. When the masks are taken off the unexpected shocks the eye, the smiling performers bowing before the audience are unrecognisable when comparison with their characters. The absurdity of the masks make it is easy to understand why a plethora of stage props are unnecessary.
The scarcity of props and the single-scene structure of the play is an adaptation of Commedia dell’Arte, a form of Italian Comedy. King Hamlet’s castle is replaced with a blue and white ship of the Elsinore Shipping Co. And instead of trying to take over the kingdom, Claudius murders Hamlet’s father so that he can take over the shipping company.
The music is adapted to suit a modern audience, with comical references to well-known, sea-based movies such as Jaws, Titanic and The Little Mermaid.
Director, Jenine Collocott, is the Creative Director of Hello Elephant. Apart from directing plays, she has worked as a senior writer of two seasons of the South African children’s television series, Takalani Sesame.
