Probably the most delightful thing about London is that the best parts of it lay silent, waiting for you to find them. Midday concerts, free museums, a beautiful park and playground sandwiched among houses and ugly store fronts—these things seem to be everywhere. In my case, I stumbled upon Yorick’s skull (see right), which seems surprising in itself; but then there’s the fact that Yorick’s gibes, gambols, and songs had been reduced to…a chipmunk?
There is, of course, a context to this nonsense. It has to do with a theatre whose entrance boasted a sign that read “licensed to sell intoxicating liquor” and an audience full of eccentrics with strange objects in hand; and let’s not forget the script, something called Hamlet by William Shakespeare. The result was possibly the most unusual and by far the most amazing Shakespeare production I have ever seen.
Put on by a group of actors who call themselves The Factory, the company holes up in a different theatre each week, does not advertise its performances (except on their website, listed under my links), and asks the audience to bring objects for the actors to use while on stage. And one more thing: the audience also gets to pick which actor plays which part. No, this does not mean that the cast’s middle-aged woman can be chosen to play Hamlet. Rather, audience members are chosen at random to take part in an epic match of rock-paper-scissors (or as the Brits call it, paper-scissors-stone) that decides which, among the 2-4 candidates per part, gets to be in the final cast list.
It gets more interesting, however. The actors, who wore everyday clothes, didn’t confine their play to the stage; they roamed the aisles and cut through rows of people, stood on the seats (Hamlet almost fell off—probably on purpose—during his famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy), even relocated the entire show outside for act 2. There the cast stood on chairs or rode on the shoulders of other actors or the occasional audience member.
As if the staging wasn’t unusual enough, the actors themselves were practically usurped by the truly masked culprits: the props. People bring different stuff every time (including slinkies, a Japanese umbrella, and a cardboard cut-out of the Taco Bell dog)), and the skull-chipmunk mix-up was just one of many bizarre uses of these objects. If the randomness overwhelmed me, I can’t imagine what it must have done to the actors. But they were brilliant improvisors, so the real treat wasn’t laughing at what junk the audience had to offer, but watching the ingenious ways the actors managed to use it.
The play began with the ghost of King Hamlet running past the other actors with a football (an American one); when Hamlet Jr. finally sees his father’s ghost, they throw the football back and forth, like any father and son would on a Sunday afternoon; and even though death separates them, throwing the football bonds them together. King Hamlet’s final exit from the play has Hamlet Jr. jumping up and down, hands in the air, as if he’s beckoning his father to throw the ball back to him—but he never does.
Not all of the objects were so poignant, though; some were downright hilarious. Act 1 begins with Horatio, Marcellus, and others on watch, during which time Marcellus carried (and occasionally petted) a giant frog, which he hopped over every time he had to run somewhere. Polonius wore a huge Afro-style wig to disguise himself from Hamlet in Act 4. Ophelia carried a sign with her that read, “Caution: the Bitch Switch is on” for the majority of Act 3. During Hamlet’s lecture to his mother on her unfaithfulness, he illustrated his point by comparing an Eiffel Tower statue, symbolizing his dead father, to a bunch of silver tinsel, for Claudius. Ophelia and Hamlet argued by playing on a toy keyboard as they yelled at each other. Hamlet stabbed Polonius by shoving a little teddy bear in his face. And let’s not forget Hamlet’s own little play in Act 3—the scene: the king is lying in a garden (shown by the actor lying on top of a piano); his crown is stolen (the actor’s jacket is removed) and poison is poured into his ear (at which point the villainous usurper grabs and toothbrush and furiously scrubs the king’s teeth!). The king now dead (he remains sitting up on the piano, wearing the wide smile he wore while getting his teeth brushed), the villain makes a move on the grieving queen. As a token of love/offer of marriage, he grabs a jar of mayonnaise and offers it to her. She staunchly refuses (rightly so)—but he is persistent, and to prove that his love is not past its expiration date, he opens the jar, dips his finger inside, and eats a nice dollop right there. But is the queen convinced? He offers her the mayo again, this time as another dollop on his finger…and this time, she grabs his hand and licks it off. Sultry, suggestive…and so gross. But effective, oh yes!
After Hamlet’s little play, it was time for Claudius’ soliloquy, for which the actor grabbed, ingeniously, a rubber band ball. At first he tugged at the outer ones as he spoke, pulling them off for something to do. As he grew more anxious, though, the bands started flying off with more ferocity, until eventually he was ripping the whole thing apart. Abruptly, he stopped, and all eyes followed one last rubber band as it sailed through the air; as we watched it fly up and fall slowly down, he said, “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below; Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”
This is when my inner English major did a mini-cheer.
But this story is not yet over. The play ended, true to form, with a little battle between Hamlet and Laertes. You might remember it to be a glorified fencing match, with Laertes carrying a poison-tipped sword…but they fought instead with piggy banks. Hamlet “hit” Laertes by being the first to drop a coin in his little bank. The audience got a little crazy once they realized what was going on and started throwing pennies (some people got hit in the head), so Hamlet and Laertes ended up running crazily around the stage in search of the coins; eventually, though, Laertes found his lucky penny, and the deed was done. Death by piggy bank. At that point, though, I couldn’t imagine a sadder way to die.
We left the theatre a little shell-shocked from what he had just seen. Was that really one of those pinwheels you stick in your front lawn that Hamlet kept twirling absent-mindedly? Did Hamlet really destroy the little disposable camera that stupid Rosencrantz and Guildenstern kept flashing to bother their depressed murderer of a friend? And seriously, the mayonnaise? Several articles praising the show mention a particular performance in which Ewan McGregor was in the audience and a live baby was used as a prop (that takes the cake). So my next question is this: when do I get to see it again?
