Sir, – I may be wrong. I must be wrong, with so many audience members standing cheering at the end, but unlike them and your reviewer Peter Crawley ("The most dangerous Hamlet ever?", September 29th), I hated every one of the 165 minutes (no interval) of Schaubühne's Hamlet at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre in Dublin.
For me the production was tacky, tasteless, self-indulgent and, worst of all, tedious in the extreme. One particularly horrible moment was when Hamlet picked on an old guy in the audience and harangued him until he stood up. “You don’t still believe in the fourth wall, do you?”, the actor jeered. He then proceeded to mock him for wearing a bag over his shoulder. “What is that? Is it a man bag?” And on and on.
If the idea was to show Hamlet as a total shit, then Schaubühne succeeded admirably; but oh, the poor poetry, murdered along with everything else. – Yours, etc,
SUSAN KNIGHT,
Croydon Green,
Marino, Dublin 3.