A version of Hamlet called HAM in which Hamlet is vegan and sad about the death of a pig as opposed to his father is the sort of show concept that gives people cold sweats about seeing theatre at the Edinburgh Fringe.
But performance art duo Hotter Project is really onto something here with a show that casually sends up cringey activist theatre, while also being brilliantly accomplished, both in terms of the deft, funny way Mary Higgins and Ell Potter make use of Shakespeare’s own words (there is a big laugh for ‘oh that this too too solid flesh would melt’) but also in the way I haven’t wanted to eat any meat since I saw it.
The loose idea is that Higgins and Potter have been driven to write a preposterous show because they think they can get funding for it. They do not seem convinced by the project and spend their whole time bickering away: Higgins is the precious, uptight vegan; Potter, by her own admission, was given the nickname ‘sausage queen’ after she ate 18 in a go once.
The duo’s fractious odd-couple absurdity and the fact that they treat the entire project as if they know it’s a stupid idea – they are also naked quite a lot, FYI – is nicely offset by how accomplished it actually all is: as well as some dazzling linguistic bits, there’s great stuff like the play within the play being reimagined as an S&M session between Higgins and a hapless member of the audience.
Does it preach? Well maybe kind of, a bit, but certainly having confirmed meat eater Potter on board makes it seem less deadly earnest, even if this aspect does sometimes seem quite undermining of the show’s message (it does appear possible from stuff Potter says later that her meat consumption had been exaggerated for effect). But personally I found that while it doesn’t hit you with too much heavy stuff overall, when it does it really lands home. Footage of pigs being slaughtered is frankly just horrible; stats like how radically good for the planet it would be if we even ate two vegan meals a day and went nuts with meat and dairy on the third really hit home for me, personally, because it feels like the show has earned a couple of moments of seriousness.
So it’s a dumb Hamlet parody, a clever Hamlet parody, a show about how useless eco theatre is that is also an effective piece of eco theatre. It has its pig and doesn’t eat it.