The Danger Ensemble had been a Brisbane-based theatre company for over a decade before uprooting and moving to Melbourne this year. For their inaugural production in our city, they’ve teamed with Theatre Works to present a show they’ve performed many times before. The Hamlet Apocalypse is their introduction and calling card, and it’s quite a doozy. Deconstructionist in nature, and strangely playful in tone, it’s a loud and frenzied way to say hello.
It opens with a line-up of the actors who step forward to introduce themselves by name and tell us something about the part they’re going to play. It’s a neat framing device, even if it demonstrates that actors don’t necessarily make the best analysts of the roles they play – Laertes may be many things, but given he colludes with the state to murder the prince, he hardly acts with “complete integrity”. Some of the actors tell us about themselves instead, statements of sweet simplicity like Mitch Wood’s “I hope they like me”. It establishes the meta-theatrical nature of the show with minimum fuss.
What follows is a strange and increasingly feverish rendering of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, one that seems to travel through Peter Greenaway via a magimix. The actors are clad in a kind of deconstructed Elizabethan garb, gorgeously designed by Oscar Clark to show a desperate reach into the past from an impossibly compromised present. The sound (Dane Alexander) and lighting (Ben Hughes) design are equally impressive, conjuring a nightmare that hurtles towards us with some judicious, and terrifying, pulses of sound and light. The cast count us down to oblivion with each shock to our senses. The entire production is a tribute to the brilliant vision of director Steven Mitchell Wright.
Those expecting a straight rendition of the play, or even a greatest hits refresher, should probably look elsewhere. While the actors begin with fully realised scenes – albeit stilted and ponderous in their playing style – they quickly devolve into mere fragments. Soon the actors’ lines start to overlap and fight for supremacy, until all is screeching and gibberish. It becomes clear fairly quickly that the actors are performing Hamlet as a means to pass away the final hours of the world’s existence; in this way, the play’s title is also its meaning and endpoint. A working knowledge of the original certainly helps for a while, but it’s of limited assistance in the progressively febrile madness. This isn’t a bad thing, and demonstrates the infinite malleability of Shakespeare’s text. It happens to function quite well as a final word, as a refraction of our insanity and our death wish.
While the dramaturgy and conceptual development of the work is second to none, only some of the actors manage the gut-wrenching oscillations between part and player that the piece requires. Mitch Wood is beautiful as himself playing the Dane, a deer caught in the headlights of expectation. Nicole Harvey is also terrific as the barely together Ophelia. Thomas Hutchins makes a wonderfully petty and pretentious Claudius, with a late personal confession that is so chilling it has to be true. Best of all is Chris Beckey as several characters, nailing the very idea of the actor’s process as it starts to wilt and decompose.
The Hamlet Apocalypse is a bold, rather bolshy choice as an opening gambit; it’s troubling and challenging theatre that takes a concept and runs with it, even at the risk of leaving an audience bewildered or even bored. It is disconcerting to see a cast perform large swathes of the play at an increasingly breakneck speed, while the doomsday clock ticks faster and faster. Everyone knows that Hamlet is the play that ends with the most bodies on stage; it’s a lot more uncomfortable when you know, as an audience member, that you’re going to be one of them.
