Remember, Remember the fifth of November...
And then I remembered. Doh! How could I forget?!
I'd booked to see Ben Duke's The Last Hamlet at Sadler's Wells East. From Rufus, the slipper thief of my previous post, to Lost Dog's Great Dane, there seems to be something of a canine theme developing here. Although, as it turns out, this particular dog is more of a big cat...
The last time I saw Ben Duke on stage was well over a decade ago in Paradise Lost (lies unopened beside me) at Battersea Arts Centre. A one-man show, and it was mesmerising. I hung on every word. There was magic in that heady combination of the language, concept and physical movement.
I had gone thanks to another circus-loving Lucy, Ribchester, whose book The Hourglass Factory opens with a suffragette swinging on a trapeze, and who had also written numerous circus reviews for The Herald up in Edinburgh. This had been our night "off" circus, only to find Ben ascending a rope at one point and doing a spot of invisible juggling at another. There is no escape, we joked.
It was that summer I saw Barely Methodical Troupe's Bromance and Cirk La Putyka's surreal Dolls, both up at the Fringe. Ben Duke subsequently directed BMT's Kin, and now BMT's Charlie Wheeller is appearing in Cirk La Putyka's anniversary show Okamžik, which I'm heading to Prague tomorrow to see. Funny how these threads keep coming together.
Having seen The Last Hamlet, words fail me. It was bonkersly brilliant, but part of its five-star magic lies in its unpredictability, and it would be sacrilege to spoil that. The set design by Soutra Gilmour was ingenious. "Thinking outside the box" maybe not quite the right expression here. Or perhaps it is. You'll have to see for yourself. The Q&A in my next post will offer some insights into the creative process, although that's probably best read after seeing the show. What I will share here is the impact it's already made, and the premise, which is simple: Hamlet is going to be staged for one last time, and soft toys play the other characters.
As we took our seats, a radio on stage played Kylie Minogue's "I Should Be So Lucky". Well, we'd hit the jackpot. And it took us back, like a tape spooling time in reverse. Whatever disasters are going on in our lives, Carolyn and I always seem to bring out each other's inner child. I promptly knocked over my glass of water everywhere. Muppet. I looked round at the audience behind us, partly in embarrassment, partly out of curiosity. A performer a couple of rows back who I recognised from the very first show I'd seen at that Edinburgh Fringe. A few others had that National Circus student vibe. An alert, engaged audience, as showed in the Q&A after.
Thursday had been the only possible night to go, but in a happy coincidence it was also the one with a post-show discussion and BSL interpretation. After seeing deaf actor Olivia Burton-Laws make her professional debut in The Penelopiad at York Theatre Royal, I'd been particularly looking forward to the BSL interpretation. I loved the way Ben welcomed Clare's signing into the centre of the performance, making it part of the choreography, particularly given how little time they'd had to integrate it, as we learnt in the Q&A.
I expected to laugh, given the absurdity of the premise, but not to the point where I feared I wouldn't be able to stop, only for Hamlet to pull the rug from underneath us and my stomach to drop like a dead weight. And Anna B Savage's singing. Spellbinding. Another reason to see this show.
I did not expect to well up thinking about Hamlet's reaction to news of his father's death. I had been abroad, at the end of the phone, when my own father died. The same moon shining over the port of Tarifa would have been watching over him in Hampshire, I had reflected. A lunatic thought? Another moment later on was also a grave trigger. All I will say to that is bloody hell, and thank you Hannah Shepherd, your Ophelia nailed it. And Miguel Altunaga, wow, escalofríos ¡aché! Anyone reading this, you have to see them in action.
But somehow watching the performance shifted a weight that's been hanging over me recently, in this season when the veil thins. An existential crisis isn't madness. Sometimes it's just a cloud of grief passing over. If only Hamlet had known that and sat with it a little more. I want to sit with this performance a little longer, too. It had hallucinogenic qualities, like theatrical LSD. We emerged in an altered state (!) marvelling at the world around us, its luminosity.
Leaving the theatre, Carolyn and I waited ages inside for the electronic rotating poster to cycle through the year's productions and come back to The Last Hamlet, so we could snap our moment for posterity, then again when we discovered one outside too, collapsing in giggles at the ridiculousness of our fangirling. We then registered that we hadn't heard a single firework as we passed a Chihuly-inspired (or created?) glass flower in the meadow, glowing with urban embers. We soaked up the towering architecture and the magnificance of the metropolis, feeling like Alice in Wonderland. Approaching the escalator down to Stratford station, we spotted triffid-like sculptures blinking at us (Okamžik means in an instant, or in a blink of an eye) and ended up going backwards down the escalator taking selfie videos to capture them in the background for the hell of it. The precariousness of our descent set us off, exploding in laughter, all over again.
You can't take us anywhere.
But thankfully Hamlet did.
Cheers. Encore.
Photo credit: Christophe Raynaud de Lage from https://theaterscene.com
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