Upon entering the Baby Grand in the Pleasance Courtyard, you’re greeted by a stage littered with dried flowers, candles, apples and handwritten pieces of paper. There is an envelope propped up, center stage that reads: “The lights will go down and a member of the audience will open this letter…” It’s an ominous beginning to George Rennie’s Hamstrung, a retelling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet from the perspective of Yorick.
Yorick, the King’s jester, is traditionally an unseen character in Hamlet’s tale, only physicalized in the famous ‘Alas Poor Yorick, I knew him, Horatio!’ monologue in Act 5, Scene 1 of one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays as a skull. Facing indecision and despair after learning that his uncle had murdered his father, Hamlet is met with the existential threat of his own death. Yorick’s skull goes on to represent much of the themes in Hamlet, namely death, corruption and greed. In this much revered monologue, Hamlet asks of Yorick’s skull:
Where be your gibes now? your
gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment,
that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one
now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen?
Now get you to my lady’s [Ophelia’s] chamber, and tell her, let
her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must
come; make her laugh at that.
In this tragicomic reimagining, Yorick comes to us from the wings after having been summoned by the audience member who opens the envelope. For those who are unfamiliar with Yorick’s tale, it may come as a surprise that he is but a ghost, living between life and death, between Shakespeare’s written narrative and his own. It’s an interesting concept, but what could be an interrogation into a performer’s role in a morally decaying society falls into a clumsy, often difficult to follow one dimensional narrative.
Rennie is an endearing and captivating performer, and his audience interaction seems natural and well-humored. But the writing and construction of the piece doesn’t do enough to showcase either Rennie’s full capacity as a performer nor fill in the void of Yorick, which is ultimately a blank canvas.
Image provided by Pleasance Press Release.