Play of the Week: Hamlet

In today's post, Miss Mazur introduces the senior school production of Hamlet by William Shakespeare.

Last year I went to a gig by grunge-country singer-songwriter Stephen Wilson Jr., whose debut album (Son of Dad), is an ode to his late father. One of my favourite lyrics of his is ‘grief is only love that’s got no place to go’. SWJ’s emotive lyrics fuse with an intensely masculine sound, offering a model for masculine grief. 

Listening to the album, I realised that it is this fusion which Hamlet struggles to embody. I was keen to direct a version of the play in which these voices could speak to each other. So we decided that all the music in our production would be from Son of Dad to enable this to happen.

As Hamlet struggles to come to terms with the untimely death of his father, those around him change and grow distant. Misunderstood, isolated and spied upon, Hamlet’s desperate attempts to find a path to truth stoke a cat-and-mouse game between him and his father’s murderer. As it becomes less and less apparent who is chasing who, it is clear that Hamlet’s fate is fast becoming sealed.

Shakespeare articulates the oftentimes indescribable nature of grief with immense clarity in this play. Rather than declamations, we are shown a verisimilitude that is unavoidably piercing. Considering the context of Shakespeare’s personal life makes this all the more poignant; he lost his father and his eleven-year-old son, Hamnet, within five years of one another. Two years later he published Hamlet.

‘how weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world’

For me, Hamlet is the closest we get to understanding Shakespeare’s views on grief and mortality. He paints a picture that is complex and contradictory; it is marred by anger, confusion, self-loathing and guilt. Hamlet yearns for guidance and is tortured by the absence of his father. His urgent and aggressive response to being dumped by his girlfriend shows that he is not, as he fears, incapable of action, but a young man who is lost in his grief. This is further exasperated by the fact that he is constantly surveilled and judged for his reactions.

Our production is an abridged version of a text adapted by Robert Icke. We hope to honour the domesticity of Shakespeare’s original, whilst paying homage to Icke’s focus on surveillance. My thanks go to the whole cast and creative team for a thoroughly rewarding process.

Our thanks to Miss Mazur for letting us publish her introduction to the play: you can watch the trailer for the production here, and if you don't yet have your tickets, grab them soon - they're selling fast!  You might also be interested in reading Mr Hager's review of Maggie Farrell's novel Hamnet, which explores the story of Shakespeare's son, and his parents' response to his death: you can find it here.