Blind Hamlet review

Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour caused a deserved stir at the 2011 Fringe with ‘White Rabbit Red Rabbit’, a piece performed script in hand by a fresh actor every night, with each only seeing the text for the first time as they read it. It was good fun, but also pretty devastating, its format playing powerfully with the fact that Soleimanpour was himself unable to leave to perform the show himself (as he wasn’t allowed a passport, having refused national service).

Its follow-up, ‘Blind Hamlet’, devised with director Ramin Gray for the Actors’ Touring Company, dabbles its toes in not totally dissimilar waters. This time there isn’t even an actor on stage at first, just a dictaphone operated by the stage manager, who sets it playing under a mic. We’re addressed by a voice purporting to be the playwright, who describes himself as in his fifties, in Russia, and going blind. As far as I know, none of those things are true of Soleimanpour, and I must confess to not quite following the exact rationale behind the first two. 

The blindness though, is important: I’m still concerned that I’m missing the mark here, but to me ’Blind Hamlet’ would seem to be a coded play about the arbitrary and brutal nature of the Iranian (possibly Middle Eastern, possibly global) justice system. In light of what it builds to, the various references to ‘Hamlet’ and Soleimanpour’s fascination with it, despite never having read the second half, presumably all allude to the Danish prince’s wildly mismanaged attempts to bring his father’s killer to justice. Here the recorded Soleimanpour keeps asking audience members up on stage, until the point when he stops and the stage manager is left to conduct a game with the group, in which they vote by committee which two of them they believe are killers who should be executed.

Once it gets round to it, ‘Blind Hamlet’ makes its points well enough (though it probably wasn’t Soleimanpour’s intent that the contestants in our show actually managed to correctly guess the two designated killers). But it feels slight and code-bound, with much less punch than ‘White Rabbit, Red Rabbit’.

Moreover, it also seems to be a disappoingly less ambitious show than the ‘interactive theatrical battle’ that ‘reimagines the bloody struggle for Hamlet’s Elisinore’ it was originally billed as (a less ambitious revised description was issued last month). I can understand why that would have been mind-bogglingly complicated to stage, but frankly it sounds like a more substantial work. I can’t help but think that like Hamlet, Soleimanpour should have just gone for it with his first impulse.

By Andrzej Lukowski