“… a perfect payoff for the audience.”
Suzanne Mackay
5 Stars
Venue: Carriageworks
Dates: 14th – 25th January 2025
On its surface Hamlet Camp is a thespian ode, an homage to the actors’ shared experience of inhabiting a character, and the vagaries of a life on the stage. Dig a little deeper however, and a broader theme emerges.
The vague premise – that Brendan Cowell, Ewen Leslie, and Toby Schmitz have all played Hamlet, the most iconic of Shakespeare’s leading men – is the hook which transports us to the padded walls of the play. By setting the characters in a form of Shakespeare rehab, the actors use their own and others’ experience to extrapolate on what it means to be on the stage. It’s been my experience that a life in the theatre is as difficult as it appears glamorous, the vocational pathway being one of bright lights and sharp rocks, with more insecurities and pathologies than the DSM-V, which makes it perfect fodder to plumb. This is not to say that Hamlet Camp is in any way self indulgent, the actors perform with a levity which lifts the piece beyond mere navel gazing, the comedic timing is perfect and the wit as sharp as it gets. It runs at the pace of a freight train as they try and extricate themselves from the prison of the mind, as they attempt to figure out where they are and the meaning behind the madness. The dialogue overlaps and spirals adding to the vaudevillian absurdity – like the love child of Beckett and Monty Python – culminating in a short intense labour and a flurry of Benedict Andrew’s gold glitter. A perfect payoff for the audience.
This play works primarily due to the initial setup, before the ghost of Hamlet has begun to permeate the theatre. The three monologues, delivered one at a time, perfectly set up both the rhythm and pace of the show but more importantly point to the deeper themes. Each monologue is personal yet universal enough to make use of the term ‘hard relate’, be it a discussion of literature, art, the thrill of working in retail, coming home or the stuff we surround ourselves with and how it holds us together. Despite the history of theatre being heavily saturated with the stories of men, it’s genuinely heartening to see a piece which plumbs the depths of the male experience outside the prism of sex and violence; without the manly ‘hot mess’ trope and with insights into how they think and feel as individuals.
The shows run is relatively short and available tickets are scarce, but there’s some hope it will be shown more broadly down the track. In the meantime, grab your existential crisis and try as hard as you can to get your hands on a ticket.
Photo – Daniel Boud
Suzanne Mackay, Theatre Now
