Pointing up uncertainties in Hamlet

One of the twists Pan Pan has given Shakespeare’s classic is to let the audience choose who will play the lead each night, writes Colette Sheridan

INNOVATIVE Dublin theatre company Pan Pan brings its take on Hamlet to Cork’s Everyman Palace Theatre tonight and tomorrow. This version of the play, entitled The Rehearsal, Playing the Dane, scrutinises the complexity of Hamlet and even goes so far as to allow the audience to choose from one of three actors up for the role of the great procrastinator. This is all part of the play, which has been on a major tour that started off at the Melbourne Festival in October.

Speaking from New York during the play’s run there, director Gavin Quinn describes the production as being an honest reaction to Hamlet. “It’s a very alive piece; audiences really go for it. We thought it might be interesting to involve the audience in the difficulties involved in casting the character of Hamlet. You could say that the role is almost unplayable. It’s such a demanding role and it’s hard to meet expectations. Some say the role is too funny; others say it’s too antic or too serious. Playing the role is almost an impossible task, a Herculean feat. That was our original idea.”

The audience is invited on to the stage where they vote on the actor they want to play Hamlet. Quinn is on stage as the director, “just doing what I normally do. There’s also a real casting director on stage and an academic who gives a lecture about Hamlet.” There is even a dog on stage, a great Dane.

Pan Pan’s treatment of Hamlet has both a playful side to it and an academic perspective. Quinn says it’s a yin and yang approach. “Sometimes, theatre is dumbed down and people are almost afraid to talk about it, especially in the case of Hamlet. On the one hand, we’re looking at the intellectual side of Hamlet and on the other hand, there’s the anti-intellectual side.”

Quinn illustrates this by describing how actor Conor Madden talks about Hamlet. “It’s quite natural in an audition to talk about the play. It’s not just about reading and performing the lines. The actor is asked why he chose the piece he is reading. Conor talks about reading Hamlet at school for the Leaving Certificate.”

Pan Pan’s audacious approach to Hamlet, complete with asides and commentary, is informed by the nature of the protagonist who is, says Quinn, such a modern character. “He seems to have come out of nowhere. It’s almost as if he’s surrounded by antique characters such as the king and queen of Denmark.

“Hamlet is very modern in that he goes in for a lot of soul searching. He is so self conscious. He delves into his strange psyche. It’s almost as if with Hamlet, we have the birth of the melancholic man.

“There’s the idea of him being miserable and walking the corridors. He has, if you like, neurotic characteristics. Initially, he doesn’t do anything about the fact that his father has been killed. Then he ends up doing all these strange things like killing his friends from university and having a totally ambivalent relationship with Ophelia. He sort of shuns her but suddenly gets very upset when she commits suicide.”

Compared to other plays from the period, it seems extremely modern. “As T S Eliot said, it’s the Mona Lisa of literature. It is, perhaps, more valued as a work of art than something you’d go and see.”

Quinn promises that Pan Pan’s production offers a way of encountering Hamlet never before experienced. There’s the lecture on Hamlet as well as the democratic method of casting the lead character.

In the third section of the play, a series of scenes from Hamlet that Pan Pan has put together, are acted out. “We have picked certain scenes to make sense of what we’re trying to do. Audiences will see five or six scenes from the original play.”

As Quinn points out, this is a valid exercise given that there are three different versions of Hamlet in existence. “There is instability in the text from the start,” he says.

The set is a graveyard in the second part of the play. “Our interpretation of Hamlet is that he is in purgatory. He lives between life and death. It’s also about the idea that the characters are ghosts. We have created an atmosphere that the audience can become mesmerised by. A lot of the ideas come from the Hamlet text. Hamlet is so theatrical.”

As Quinn states, the character of Hamlet is “a connoisseur of theatre”. And that’s grist to the mill for Pan Pan, which sees theatre as a very open and exciting form of expression.