Review: World's Fastest Hamlet 2009 by Austin Shakespeare
by Michael Meigs
Austin Shakespeare winked at the bard and happily laughed at itself with The World's Fastest Hamlet, a twenty-minute show given its second (annual?) staging at First Night Austin, the December 31 downtown festival.
Last year the same four-actor cast performed twice under the First Street Bridge during a bright, mild afternoon. This year they briefly took the music stage at City Hall Plaza at 6:15 p.m. as dark fell and the First Night parade unwound behind them along the lake front.
The joke is one of Ultimate Compression. When you take a great and renowned three-hour tragedy and metaphorically throw it into a car-crusher, only the crazy survives. The script is built of familiar patches of dialogue, all in their proper order, but without the emotional depth or imagery of the tragic. Those who know and love that vigorous meditation on treachery, guilt, responsibility, love, friendship, rank, decision and mortality are left with only the "vigorous" part of it. And what could be more absurd?
So this guy in a black beret is called up on the ramparts for a dialogue with a ghost, puts on an antic disposition, repudiates his girlfriend, threatens his uncle king and aunt mother, skewers a counselor, battles pirates, gets back to contemplate a skull and encounter the unexpected funeral of the girlfriend, accepts a friendly fencing match and winds up surrounded by corpses before becoming one himself. What?? And this, they say, is probably the greatest literature ever written in English??
Imagine doing all that at breakneck speed with four actors popping out from behind a flimsy screen, waving props like a flimsy "Casper the ghost" cut-out and using the wildest out-in-the-saloon melodramatic style.
It's a blast, and it's all the funnier when you recognize familiar Austin Shakespearians. ALT has reviewed most of them.
Gwen Kelso played a mischievous Rosalind in As You Like It and an enraptured Juliet in Romeo and Juliet. Robert Deike was a monumentally befuddled Baptista in Taming of The Shrew. Ted Meredith is well known in Austin's busy improv comedy scene.
Director Beth Burns directed last summer's As You Like It and is preparing an "original practice" (all male) version of Taming of the Shrew for this coming May. Artistic Director Ann Ciccolella was there to support them.
Justin Scalise appeared again this year as Hamlet. Since arriving from post-Katarina New Orleans Scalise has featured in various venues as Feste in Twelfth Night, old Adam and Silvius in As You Like It, Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, and Lucio in Measure for Measure. Scalise aims to stage a full Hamlet -- the more serious version -- this coming March and April.
The players o'ertopped the joy and nonsense of performing and witnessing a 15-minute parody of Hamlet with their curtainless curtain-call: first, with a two-minute Hamlet, and then with a ten-second version.
This show was the ridiculous happily distilled from the sublime. In a sense, Austin Shakespeare company members were parodying themselves and the whole enterprise of acting. Make believe is necessarily counter-factual and sometimes nonsensical, but mimesis delights and entertains.
The four rose with good grace and energy to the technical and environmental challenges of a cold, windy stage, uncertain sound amplification, almost non-existent lighting and the fifty-foot stretch of plaza that separated them from the audience. City Hall steps were full, despite competing attractions, and spectators were enthusiastic.
Ted Meredith cheerfully ragged viewers about topping off their "culture" for 2009 with The World's Fastest Hamlet and put in plugs both for Austin Shakespeare's February production of Mary Stuart by Schiller and its May production of The Dream, a free-of-charge 1960s-style musical version of Midsummer Night's Dream in Zilker Park, just across from downtown.
World's Fastest Hamlet 2009
by William Shakespeare, adapted by Austin Shakespeare
Austin Shakespeare
