“There’s a problem when you try to understand big things by looking at small things. You get lost.” So says Shakespeare to the ghost of his son Hamnet (not a typo) in Irish theatre company Dead Centre’s latest play, now showing as part of Dublin Theatre Festival. The line comes about halfway through the work, but it’s a key in to the bones of the play. The real-life Hamnet died age eleven, while Shakespeare was away working. In Dead Centre’s Hamnet, we meet a young boy in a limbo space, waiting eternally for his father, who he believes is ‘a great man,’ to tell him all the things he doesn’t yet know – to teach him how to be (Hamlet). While he waits, he consults Google as a sort of surrogate parent. Dead Centre’s Shakespeare’s fear of getting lost in the small things while trying to understand the big things speaks to the archetype of an artist who forgets about the world in their efforts to make art about it. The character is so caught up in the grand themes of life that he misses the point a bit.
Inevitably, literary theorists and historians have tried to draw connections between Hamnet’s death and the bard’s most famous play Hamlet. Did this sudden tragedy impact Shakespeare’s writing, adding depth and pathos and prompting the existential angst found in the famous speech “To be, or not to be…”? Hamnet oscillates around the question of how to be in the world – whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to aspire to be a great man at the expense of personal relationships, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and, ya know, be a Dad.
This production is a departure from the company’s earlier work, the continuously successful Lippy and Chekhov’s First Play. Those were plays about the storytelling/theatrical endeavour itself: How best to tell stories? Why tell stories at all? Why keep telling stories in a theatre when there are so many other media out there? They’re art about the art. They were loud and bombastic with multiple actors and impressive special effects. Hamnet is quieter, barer, more focused. There are still the Dead Centre hallmarks of determinedly harnessing technology and using audience interaction, but the frame and the focus are starker, more personal-feeling, with less room to hide for the performers (co-writer/director Bush Moukarzel himself and thirteen-year- old Ollie West).
Ollie holds the stage single-handedly for much of the performance, remarkably natural and seemingly at ease. It’s quite a feat for a young and untrained actor, and a risk for the company to use a child performer. The use of split-second- timed video projection and sound (masterfully executed by video designer José Miguel Jiménez and sound designer Kevin Gleeson), piles risk on risk. There are many elements to attend to – both Ollie and Bush have to be in the exact right place at the exact right time on stage or the entire conceit of their communicating across the boundary of parallel worlds will fall apart. The script is immovable in this context and its rigidity tells against the performance at times. Some of the interactions between Shakespeare and Hamnet (like when he slaps the child in the face and calls him a little shit) read like stock scenes from a family drama. When Shakespeare strips down to his birthday suit, while reciting the lines: “Because you are gone, I no longer exist. Your father is not your father. I was only acting like your father. It’s a role I am not suited for. The part does not exist. You are alone,” the gesture of disrobing blows the sentiment out of the water a bit.
But there is sincerity and a kind of unabashed innocence here that is redeeming, helped not least by what Ollie brings to the role as a child simply engaging with a father-figure, oblivious to the existentially-angsty themes of Hamlet. Dead Centre’s strength as a company is tackling intellectually complex yet universal topics with colloquial aplomb, framed by technological innovation. In this, Hamnet succeeds as a work that is multilayered in its structure and heartfelt in its intent.
Rachel Donnelly
