The Rehearsal, Playing the Dane
08 October 2010
Pan Pan theatre company runs rings around its audience, as an onstage Director figures out whether this is to be or not to be a production of Hamlet. Their extended riff on Shakespeare’s play is skittishly clever, with an antic disposition all of its own. Groaning with puns, both textual and visual – there’s a Great Dane on a lead – this version knowingly excavates the play’s layers, giving us multiple readings and options.
It is as if the brainiest gang in the class let rip in a rehearsal room, showing off, jumping in and out of dustbins, pelting each other with skulls, and generally taking up where Tom Stoppard left Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. In his selection of the text, director Gavin Quinn has created a hall of mirrors, so that the play-within-a-play is Hamlet itself – the gravediggers' scene. Aedín Cosgrove’s set is lined with mirrors too, used to great effect with candlelight, as the giddiness is calmed and focus returns to Shakespeare’s lines. Judith Roddy (pictured) plays Ophelia’s madness with piercing simplicity, as if living through every moment for the first time, proffering beer cans and crisp bags to the front row, rather than herbs and flowers. For all its complexity and intellectual bravura, this production shines when it is at its most direct, with troubled hearts and minds stripped bare.
Until Sunday 10 October, at Samuel Beckett Theatre, in Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival 2010. Read Peter Crawley's review.