Kupenga Kwa Hamlet - Two Gents Productions at The Oval House Theatre

By a strange coincidence I seem to be seeing a play a week already, and it’s not even 2011 yet! Last night we battled the snow to see Two Gents Productions’ Kupenga Kwa Hamlet.

I saw Two Gents’ last production, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and was really impressed with how accessible the production was and how high energy and fun to watch. So I was looking forward to seeing how they would tackle a tragedy.

I’m no purist when it comes to Shakespeare and love to see the plays tackled in totally new ways. Two Gents Productions draw on the two actors’ Zimbabwean/Shona background to place Shakespeare in an entirely new social and cultural setting. In this case, the Shona attitudes toward family ties, death and ancestors made this a really fresh look at the play. A highlight was the exuberant Rossencraft and Gilderstone, re-imagined as witch doctors, entertaining Hamlet by using members of the audience to be the players. This comic energy was reprised towards the end with the singing grave diggers.

And that’s what Denton Chikura and Tonderai Munyevu are really good at: comedy. Switching quickly between characters with self aware references “Corambis also known as Polonius: We’re doing the first Quarto.” Mixing cultural references from Zimbabwe and Shakespeare, making the plot really accessible to people who don’t know the play very well and keeping everyone hooked with music and clowning around.

Where I felt the production fell down was in getting the real power of the tragedy to come across. The big tragic speeches and scenes had been intentionally reined back and were quiet and understated. After watching David Tennant’s high energy, high intensity Hamlet this quiet considered Hamlet just felt a bit disappointing. I think the actors were concerned about not making the tragedy comic by over dramatising it but in doing this I felt they had lost something. Particularly as the production was entitled The Madness of King Hamlet, I was hoping for a bit more cursing the sky, chucking Ofelia around, jumping in the grave, that kind of thing. Instead “get thee to a nunnery” was spoken as callous but pretty sane advice to a pregnant Ofelia to indicate that he did not want anything to do with the baby. While it was a clever change, as a lover of Hamlet I thought this was a bit of a waste of a good scene. It also meant that Ofelia’s next lines, indicating dismay at a Hamlet robbed of his wits, didn’t quite fit. The new situation surely rather demanded that she rail against his deception and cowardly behaviour.

There were other points too where the reinterpretation didn’t quite fit. After telling her father she’d been nothing but aloof with Hamlet, why would Ofelia then confront Hamlet about her pregnancy when she knows the King is listening in to their conversation? Perhaps that’s just me but I like it when a production which re-works a story has a real attention to detail.

Aside from these little details though, I enjoyed the way the text had been reinterpreted. It was like watching the play for the first time, I didn’t know what was coming next or what to expect. As the production added portions of new script written in modern English and sections of African language (presumably Shona) it was a clever move to use the less well known first quarto text. It meant that the sections of Shakespeare that usually sound so familiar became unfamiliar making the whole play gel together better than it might have otherwise done. (Of course, it’s also always easier to avoid cliché with “To be or not to be/aye there’s the point.”)

I also enjoyed seeing Hamlet’s mother, Gertred in this production, a lot less passive than usual. She comes round to cooperating with Hamlet rather than naively siding with Claudius and also drinks the poison knowingly as the end after it is revealed that the king is abusive towards her. This change, combined with a seductive and sexually active Ofelia, created a more modern and realistic representation of women, which was great because the play can often come across as quite anti-women in a traditional staging.

I would recommend this production, but perhaps not to people new to Hamlet as I think the plot was a little confused and some of the really powerful parts of the play were not as effective as they can be. If Two Gents Productions turn their hand back to comedy for their next production though, I’ll be dragging as many people as possible to see it.