Our reviews give their verdict on the latest Sydney Festival shows.
What to do when “H” is coursing through your veins, and you constantly crave more? Where to go? If the “H” stands for Hamlet rather than heroin, help is at hand. Ex-Hamlets can attend Hamlet Camp, a rehabilitation facility for those poor souls who’ve play-acted the Dane, and since that day have never been quite sane.is January’s highlight. Played in the round on a bare stage in a smallish space, it spotlights performance rather than director-driven conceptions.
Now in asylum garb, Cowell plays Stephen, Schmitz is Marcus and Leslie is Cameron – the latest to be committed, he maintains he’s still Hamlet, a stage the others have outgrown. But something is rotten in the state of their treatment. To be cruel only to be kind, every time they begin to quote from“To be” becomes a dangerous way to start a sentence. Despite this ever-present threat, they compare their forays into this pinnacle of psychological and philosophical insight.
Ultimately, there is no recovery and there’s the rub. You’re hooked for life – except you become too old to play the role, the predicament in which they now find themselves. That may sound glum, but the show’s wildly funny, these three fellows of infinite jest volleying off one another in hugely engaging fashion, and enjoying the therapy of an excuse to revisit the great Dane. Well, almost. Brevity being the soul of wit, it flashes past in 90 minutes. The rest is silence..
It highlights the company’s outstanding talent: the dancers have exceptional physical and theatrical confidence, and an appetite for risk that laces their dancing with raw boldness. They’re clad in green-hued streetwear that gives their athleticism a gritty, grungy edge as they race across the stage, hair and garments flying, to Robin Fox’s electro-acoustic score.
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