Fooling About with Hamlet

Riffs on shakespeare: Hamlet
The Footsbarn Company
The Observer

The Footbarn Company sounds as if it ought to be a band of German strolling players.

In fact it does stroll and is popular on the Continent. Its base though is Cornwall, and holiday making actors who have encountered it there have declared themselves so impressed that they were tempted to through it all in and go foots barnstorming themselves.

Last week Footsbarn’s Hamlet marked the company’s London debut (at the Golden Lane Theatre in the Barbican) and its first tussle with a received text. Generally they work up their own, and what they offered here was not exactly Shakespeare: rather, an acrobatic paraphrase. The favoured method of entry, on to a circular platform apparently covered in green baise, was the graceful pole-vault. Costumes veered from the Orient (Rosencrantz- there was no Guildenstern- looked like a down-at-heel mandarin), through Araby (Hamlet in his mourning state being sternly yash-maked), to Turkey, at which point it met up with the music which, though skilful and effective, recalled the sensation of being seated up by the jukebox in a kebab house.

The performance lasted only two hours, so much went. The first scene was mimed, crowned by the appearance of a horrifically bony ghost. ‘To be or not to be’ was cut entirely (cheeky) and the other soliloquies pared to the bone. All other speeches are made easy. ‘Will you listen’ said the Ghost, huffily reinterpreting the original ‘List, list, O list.’

Some scenes were re-extended to give scope to the actors’ talents for tumbling and funny voices: the grave diggers were upped to three, with a whole new routine, and the players became a collection of Chico Marxes. Melodrama was strong and so were visuals; at the close the bodies were covered by a great dust sheet, on which the lighting picked out a pattern of skulls.

Hamlet made little impression beyond some enthusiastic gibbering and cock-a-doodling when insane, but there was an Ophelia with a will of her own and a Polonius who, for the third time this year, came close to walking off with the play: an inveterate political shover, whether briefing a quintet of spies (‘you- follow my son Laertes and see what he gets up to’) or boasting about his past (‘I was in a play once, you know’) and ending up spectacularly impaled on Hamlet’s spear. In the end, though, I was left wondering what it was all for. There was enough Hamlet left to arouse our interest in the story, not enough to maintain it.