The long read: Hamlet at NYUAD is a production unlike any other

In a discussion about William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, there are certain phrases and expressions that you might expect to come up. The words “crazy” “exciting” “cool” and “awesome” are definitely not among them. But then, Theater Mitu’s production of Hamlet/Ur-Hamlet, which has its world premiere at NYUAD Arts Center this Thursday night complete with a garage rock band performing live, is more than a little bit unexpected. In fact, it’s fair to say that you won’t have experienced a production of Hamlet quite like it before.

As the title suggests, Hamlet/Ur-Hamlet uses the text that the English playwright committed to paper around 1599 as source material but acknowledges that the legend of the Prince of Denmark, a young man who loses his father and suffers at the hands of his uncle, has even deeper roots in Scandinavian, European and Roman folklore. The sources that Shakespeare himself drew upon are the subject of much academic debate and the only real certainty is that it is not an original work.

It’s surely not inappropriate then that the experimental theatre company, which has been based at New York University in Abu Dhabi for the past four years, takes Shakespeare’s play as a starting point and has a kind of fun with it, mixing the company members’ individual responses to the Elizabethan work with the idea of “Hamlet” and the very many associations the name holds. The result is an hour-long piece of theatre that leaps over traditional boundaries: part dramatic performance; part art gallery of installations; part rock concert.

The 100-strong audience will be invited to explore the installations at their own pace, eating flower petals along the way, and gathering (or not) around a central performance space at intervals to listen to The Othermen perform original punk-rock songs and to watch seven members of the company perform short extracts from Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Original article by Clare Dight

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The long read: Hamlet at NYUAD is a production unlike any other