Catching Up: May 24, 2011 Worst Hamlet Ever

After class, Andy and I went to Sainsbury's and got a ton of groceries. It was a long awaited grocery run. Then we relaxed until we had to leave for Hamlet at the Rose Kingston Theatre!

Before the show, I was so excited about seeing another Hamlet that I drew a diagram of the damn set! Buuut, it was so horrible that I did not want to waste my time redrawing it into my journal.

I will share with you some of the notes I wrote down during the show to pass the time/to distract myself from the butchering of my favorite play.

• Where was "A little more than kin..."?
• Ophelia is a nobody.
• Pacing...? too jerky with no sense of lingering ever. But, at the same time, cues are not being picked up fast enough!
• No matter their age, these actors are making immature choices.
• Where is your power Claudius? Hmmm?
• The bagpipes were pretty, I guess, but they don't exactly remind me of Denmark, for God's sake.
• No one is listening. Clearly they each only have a plan for their individual performance that has absolutely nothing to do with us or their fellow actors or the damn audience!
• Final scene = Cluster f***

Afterward, we had a Q&A with the director and some of the actors and it was a pathetic experience. The director was, more or less, a complete idiot who took every question as an attack on his crappy production that he must childishly defend to the utmost. All the actors were grumpy and looked like they didn't want to be there. And the actress who played Gertrude said that she never considered why or the thought that Gertrude knows all the specifics to Ophelia's death. WHAT. AHHH.

Unforgivable.