The journey to the watch this performance started with a literally confusing journey to find the place.
Once we got there and the performance started, I was completely spellbound. There is really no experience as enriching and enlightening as watching live theatre. Especially when it by a company as impressive as the Globe Theatre
The performance started with a musical number that the entire cast was a part of. It was jarring and I realized, true to real Shakespearean theatre. It also reminded me of Brechtian Theatre because it used the V-Effect. We felt completely out of place from what we had come to see and it was a like a hook pulling us out of the Coolridge’s ‘Suspension of Disbelief’. For everyone familiar with Hamlet, the song and dance number was extremely surprising. And that’s why it was effective. It woke us all up.
The performance also ended with a song and dance number. This was set up by the dead characters coming back to life to perform a coordinated happy dance. This was further V-effect. After the extremely dramatic last scene where almost every character died, it made us all realize that Hamlet was after all just a story.
In terms of performers, the company made 2 very interesting choices.
The first was that Horatio was played by a girl. At first this was an interesting choice because it added a new dimension to Hamlet and Horatio’s close relationship. While theoretically it was an intriguing choice, its application wasn’t that effective. This was because the female performer was small built and didn’t have a very good theatre voice. It was a real life example of how an idea interesting on paper can be disastrous on stage
The second was that Claudius and Hamlet Senior was played by the same actor. It was interesting to see how the performer changed his body language and voice depending on whether he was playing a ghost or a killer king. This also made Hamlet’s constant contrasting of Claudius to his father an interesting scenario because the audience saw them as one and the same. This can also go back to further disconnecting the audience from the performance, and attributed to Brecht.
2 techniques they used which can be used by us by our ensemble.
Once we got there and the performance started, I was completely spellbound. There is really no experience as enriching and enlightening as watching live theatre. Especially when it by a company as impressive as the Globe Theatre
The performance started with a musical number that the entire cast was a part of. It was jarring and I realized, true to real Shakespearean theatre. It also reminded me of Brechtian Theatre because it used the V-Effect. We felt completely out of place from what we had come to see and it was a like a hook pulling us out of the Coolridge’s ‘Suspension of Disbelief’. For everyone familiar with Hamlet, the song and dance number was extremely surprising. And that’s why it was effective. It woke us all up.
The performance also ended with a song and dance number. This was set up by the dead characters coming back to life to perform a coordinated happy dance. This was further V-effect. After the extremely dramatic last scene where almost every character died, it made us all realize that Hamlet was after all just a story.
In terms of performers, the company made 2 very interesting choices.
The first was that Horatio was played by a girl. At first this was an interesting choice because it added a new dimension to Hamlet and Horatio’s close relationship. While theoretically it was an intriguing choice, its application wasn’t that effective. This was because the female performer was small built and didn’t have a very good theatre voice. It was a real life example of how an idea interesting on paper can be disastrous on stage
The second was that Claudius and Hamlet Senior was played by the same actor. It was interesting to see how the performer changed his body language and voice depending on whether he was playing a ghost or a killer king. This also made Hamlet’s constant contrasting of Claudius to his father an interesting scenario because the audience saw them as one and the same. This can also go back to further disconnecting the audience from the performance, and attributed to Brecht.
2 techniques they used which can be used by us by our ensemble.
- The use of a curtain. Instead of stopping any act to change set or characters, the primary character just pulled a curtain close and continued another scene in front while the next scene was being prepared for at the back.
- The set was changed sometimes as a part of the scene instead of a black out. This made the performance more dynamic. They choreographed them and like Meyerhold's biomechanics, they were perfectly in sync. I can imagine this took a lot of practice and I hope to achieve this with my ensemble