Hamlet in One Hour
Short Attention Span @ Bakehouse Theatre
7:00pm, Thu 28 Feb 2002
Score: 5
Short Review: Amusing in parts
I wanted to love this. I wanted to hate it. In the end, I could do neither purely.
Let’s get one thing straight – this bears only a very passing resemblance to the Bard’s work. The script has been butchered to get it to fit in one hour – but then most of the time is spent by the cast (one male, one female) performing corn-ball acting antics towards the near full-house. And make no mistake – this is very much HAMlet. I was quite willing to perform a massacre review on this show, until the puppets…
There is an absolutely brilliant 5 minutes in the middle of the show where the two actors control a multitude of puppets and act out the killing of the King of Denmark, and subsequent wooing of the Queen, in terrific (some might say “pornographic”) detail. At this point I was willing to forgive all prior sins, and love the show to death. But then it returned to its prior state, devoid of clever machinations, and the spell was broken.
A pity, really, since that 5 minute break in the middle was gut-bustingly funny, and there was some clever theatre in there somewhere. But the show can’t be recommended for those 5 minutes alone; especially with the annihilation of the script and frequent additions of material.