A lack of intricacy in the way of plot is no bar to fine theatre. In Mingus Mahoon’s so-called ‘adaptation’ of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, however, it is. Put baldly, this is, in Mahoon’s own words, “the Hamlet of Polonius’s mind”, more specifically a Hamlet who bedevils Polonius’s dreams, a Hamlet wild-haired and swivel-eyed and clad in a straitjacket, a sayer of one word, and one word only, the word “words”, the one word he appears to mean when he says it, and he says it repeatedly. It could be said that there are a lot of words in this monodrama, and there are, lots and lots of them, but all variations on this one word “words”, the very word, or words, of course, repeated by Hamlet in his reply to Polonius’s one time query, “What do you read, my lord?” A perfectly reasonable question, one might think, given that Hamlet had, at that moment, his nose in a book. What Mingus Mahoon’s interpretation does, and that so affectedly, is to pose several key questions. Is this a Hamlet made mad by reading deep into the night? Is this a Hamlet of the homeless mind? A Hamlet not overly concerned with affairs of state? a Hamlet without his Horatio to keep him in check? a Hamlet unknown to himself but long suspected? a Hamlet not yet acquainted with the wisdom of gravediggers? a Hamlet so out of sorts he thinks himself dust, yet lingers, unable to unloose his restraints and fly free of the padded room he occupies? Clear as it is from the outset that this is Hamlet as phantasmagorially conceived in another man’s psyche, that of Polonius, it is equally clear that the Polonius who dreams this Hamlet is a Polonius most unfamiliar to his daytime companions, a Polonius not given to doling out advice, a Polonius bootless under the bedsheets, a Polonius well acquainted with the vicissitudes of being alive, a Polonius pencil-bearded and sweating by the light of a mint-green lamp.
Continue reading “Sunday Whatever: Hamlet North-North-West by Geraint Jonathan”
