okay when I direct hamlet I know exactly what I want in the opening scenes
the audience will be in traverse. when they come in hamlet will be sitting in his designated seat, on his phone. audience comes in, house lights down, stage lights up, hamlet is still on his phone. audience to either side confused, maybe annoyed like ‘who does this guy think he is smh smh’. opening battlements scene happens, hamlet pays no attention, doesn’t draw attention to himself, just sits in the audience, probably reading cracked.
end of scene one, start of scene two. claudius gertrude et al enter, take their place up on the raised stage at one end of the traverse. hamlet looks up, takes note, puts away phone. claudius starts his big long speech. hamlet pulls out bag of doritos and very loudly opens them. claudius pretends not to notice as hamlet loudly eats doritos while he tries to do his big diplomatic speech. gertrude is very embarrassed. hamlet is being a little shit. probably annoys audience to either side – offers them a chip, nudges them so he can roll his eyes at something claudius says to them, etc. claudius finishes with laertes, turns to address hamlet. ‘and now our cousin hamlet, and our son (and lil shit I s2g if I didn’t love your mother)’. hamlet addresses his first line (‘a little more than kin and less than kind’) to his neighbour in the audience. not until gertrude suggests that it only ‘seems’ with him does he drop his doritos, stand up, and address his mother. once he’s done with his ‘I know not seems’ speech, he’s embarrassed and angry at having shown such emotion, and sits angrily back down in the audience. he doesn’t get up until partway through ‘too too solid flesh’, which he starts off addressing to his neighbours
Shakespeare is best when done off-kilter, pop-culture and just plain in your face. I would watch the hell out of this, and try to get the seat next to Hamlet for the next performance.
It was Shakespeare who first said, “ONLINE DATING, UGH” and we couldn’t agree with him more. But what would the bard’s most famous characters write on their profiles, if forced to look for love on the godforsaken hellscape that is Tinder? SO GLAD YOU ASKED.
yknow if romeo had just Cried on juliets corpse for a couple hours instead of drinking poison Right Then they would have been Fine
The moral of the story is: always take time to cry for a few hours before making important decisions.
So I’m more or less being facetious here, but this is actually a thing.
Hamlet is genre savvy. Hamlet knows how Tragedies work, and he’s not going to rush in and get stabby without making absolutely certain he’s got all the facts.
Except once he thinks he has all the facts – once he’s certain that it really is the ghost of his father and Claudius really did kill him, he rushes in and stabs the wrong guy, which starts a domino line of deaths and gets Laertes embroiled in his own revenge tragedy and ultimately results in the deaths of nearly every character other than Horatio.
That’s the irony and the tragedy of the story. Hamlet knows his tropes and actively tries to avoid them, and the tropes get him anyway. It’s inevitable, the tropes are hungry.
I want a sticker that says the tropes are hungry so I can put it on my laptop
what i do is not up to you 