Hamlet
O’Reilly Theatre, Dublin 1
★★★★☆
“Don’t think you’re going to see that Hamlet,” someone says early on in this exhilarating production from the Peruvian company Teatro La Plaza. Fair warning. Some of the greatest hits do appear. There is engagement with “To be or not to be.” Ophelia meets a damp demise. The stage ends up littered with bodies.
But Chela De Ferrari, directing and writing in close collaboration with her cast, is using the text as a lever to prize open the challenges of living with Down syndrome. The actors all have that condition. Each appears to be working their own experience in with those attending the medieval court of Elsinore.
Arriving at a time when, thanks to (rebuffed) suggestions that Shakespeare no longer be compulsory for higher-level Leaving Cert students, there is much discussion of that writer’s relevance, Teatro La Plaza confirms that Hamlet retains multitudes for anyone anatomising the human condition.
In particular, the show suggests the younger characters share the frustration of people with Down syndrome at not being trusted to be themselves. Ximena Rodríguez, as Ophelia, fastens upon the notion of her father, Polonius, that she is “special” (long a patronising term for the neurodivergent).
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Why is she that? Because she has “47 chromosomes”? The discussion of Shakespeare’s best-known soliloquy drifts towards an assertion of the cast’s often denied potentialities.
All of which makes this Hamlet, played in Spanish with English surtitles, sound like a bit of a trial. It is nothing of the sort. Though deeply serious in its intentions, the piece is a riot of fun from self-aware introduction to closing communal celebrations.
We begin with faintly chilling footage of a baby being born and then having its head measured. The cast are here to explain that, although they may sometimes be slow in saying their lines, it is worth waiting for those words to arrive. So it proves.
The titular role is shared among the actors, beginning with Jaime Cruz as a playful incarnation suffering inquisition from another cast member about whether we’re talking to Hamlet, Jaime or, possibly, “Jaimelet”. De Ferrari constructs, from key speeches, a raw scaffolding on which she hangs rich, often profane set-pieces.
There are tricky layers to the famous play within a play, including a suggestion that (stay with me) the real audience’s reaction to what they’re watching may, as is the case with Claudius, reveal some uncomfortable truths.
The “To be or not to be” sequence does wonders with anxiety of influence, beginning before projections of well-known former performers and, after a recorded celebrity interview that we shan’t spoil, forcing the current Hamlet to shadow a giant Laurence Olivier in his legendary 1948 film. We are then invited to vote on whether this is a fair way of approaching the speech.
At times the construction does feel a little like a paternoster of related sketches. Not everything works so well as a lyrical death of Ophelia. But the defiant close is enough to bring a few dozen members of the audience on stage for a massed dance with the charming, committed cast.
Runs at O’Reilly Theatre, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, until Saturday, September 27th
