Hamlet

Abstract

Reviewed by: Hamlet Hassana Moosa Hamlet Presented by The Centre for Creative Arts, University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, and Daniel Galloway Consulting, hosted at https://www.kknk.co.za/eng/hamlet/, in partnership with VR Theatrical, the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees (KKNK), and the Tsikinya-Chaka Center. 31 May 2021. Adapted and directed by Neil Coppen, with translations by Buhle Ngaba and Fundile Majola. Technical production and design by Jaco van Rensburg and Wessel Odendaal. Soundscapes by Wessel Odendaal. With Anelisa Phewa (Hamlet), Buhle Ngaba (Ophelia), Rehane Abrahams (Laertes), Royston Stoffels (Polo-nius), Tony Bonyani Miyambo (Horatio), David Dennis (Claudius), Faniswa Yisa (Gertrude), Richard September (Rosencrantz/Osric), Jemma Kahn (Guildenstern), Tshego Khutsoane (Player King), Wiseman Sithole (Ghost/Gravedigger), and with stage directions read by Bianca Amato (narrator). Neil Coppen’s Hamlet was born out of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa, which necessitated several lengthy national lockdowns that saw many of the country’s cultural institutions, like those in other parts of the world, deprived of social and financial support. The Klein Karoo National Arts Festival (KKNK) website, on which this one-off online reading was hosted, explains that Hamlet was due to run at the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town in 2020, but with the onset of the pandemic and the resultant closure of the Fugard—a devastating loss to the South African theater world which broke the hearts of many—the production turned into an online reading. As a pandemic-influenced online production of Shakespeare in South Africa, the reading was not the first of its kind. In 2020, the ShakespeareZA project (reviewed in SB 38.3) supported the performances of a series of Shakespearean monologues presented online by actors from across South Africa. Like these earlier online performances, Coppen’s Hamlet proved to be a compelling demonstration of how digital mediums can be used to keep South African performances of Shakespeare alive in an unstable pandemic world. On entering the host website, audiences were met with two messages that were alternating against the black screen, which served as the backdrop for the play. The first message dutifully indicated that the actors and [End Page 139] IT team were in their respective homes preparing for the online reading to begin, while the second offered a witty cautionary note about both the temperamental nature of technology and the eeriness of the play ahead in the brief statement: “Anything can happen . . .” This strategy of communicating to the audience by using text on the black screen was employed throughout the reading to identify times and locations in the play. The start of the reading was accordingly signaled by the fading of the welcome messages, as the words “Prologue, The Funeral” were typed onto the screen. Before any actors appeared, the narrator set the scene for the reading by describing to us how these first moments of the play might have looked in a theater. Stage props included a faintly lit, “mounted Kudu head” hanging mid-air, and a “coffin dressed in a South African flag” positioned center stage. As the audience entered, they would have seen a gravedigger standing in a pit, smoking a cigarette, listening to “Zulu Gospel music” as he shoveled earth. The speaker proceeded to describe the emergence of the company of actors from the wings of the stage “dressed as dignitaries,” including “Kings, Chiefs, Government officials” and members of the “SADF” (South African Defence Force). Then, as the “house lights” dimmed, both men and women from the group on stage would have been singing and praying, and the characters of Gertrude, Hamlet, and Claudius would have become apparent from their position in the funeral procession. The narration spoken at the opening of the play made it clear that this was not simply going to be a reading of the original play-text, but also an imaginative “reading” of the theatrical performance originally envisioned by the director. The narrator became a fixed feature of the production and regularly embellished scenes with details of characters’ actions and settings. The set that audiences were invited to imagine in the prologue also highlighted the most defining feature of the production, namely its setting in contemporary South Africa. The Danish court...