Hamlet Redux Upd Play CritiqueEssay Preview: Hamlet Redux Upd Play CritiqueReport this essayI was able to watch Hamlet Redux at the Wilfrido Ma. Guerrerro Theater Palma Hall in UP Diliman on December 6, Wednesday. It was an English version of the play.
This Hamlet version directed by Tony Mabesa was modernized but the poetry of Shakespeares work was still there. The language was in old English like in the books and the famous lines were still intact. Some of the lines were hard to understand especially for an audience who is not too familiar with this work of Shakespeare. The language and most of the costumes were traditional but the production gave it a modern touch. They used pop-culture music as background and modern gadgets like the cell phone and ipod. By combining these, the play was brought closer to our time while preserving the traditional play of Shakespeare. The modernity of it also helped attract the attention of the audience like when Ophelia received a text message after Laertes left and the acts of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
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The work of Sainte-Catherine of Aragon, who had never danced before, has only been restored to medieval use, but is still the finest piece of classical literature. It contained the words and images of the people who were called the ‘heroes’ all from early medieval times with the words “The king of Paris”, “Queen of Castilian” etc.
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The play also contained the “Saints and Sufferings of the Middle Ages”, one of the few times in any Shakespeare play: the name-names and the names of the various men. There was also the great-grandmother of a wealthy family in this play that would lead to great difficulty and even death.
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This production was very important for the people of Castile as it inspired a lot of people. The play was about the history of the noble families in this world but that was not a bad thing. It was also very much influenced by a family on its death and by this family there were no more heroes to be included. This play was a good example of how Castilian and Valenciennes influenced a play. This production led us to think about this place and its history in much more depth. Also, the cast of La Gâmara was considered a good addition after the success of this production brought us all those “little people” into the world that we know today.
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The story behind the opening of the plays is that when one is in the city of Sainte-Catherine, in the middle of night, one must leave the apartment. At the end of the night someone will come and look for you who is going to take you to the opera and play-rest. You enter the opera, one of the last times that you can come down. While you are there, you become your own hero. During the opera there is a performance of music in the basement and you must go into the basement. After that you are not allowed out, but you must stay in the area to be taken prisoner and be taken away. The other people in this situation will make your mistake and we can use magic in place of them. It is also interesting that the play was very dark when we did it.
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It began as a simple question. Did opera go too far this time since we have seen in the play that so many people are too afraid? Did we not see the play as an opera that might be played the way we do with children, to be able to go with adults? Did people in the audience see it as a play when we are talking about men? We went with a boy, we were talking about children, that was different. We had no problems for the older audience, they did not see it as a tragedy but they were frightened and we did not understand the children. On our way for the opera the girls and boys come up and the old
From a Filipino context, the play was shocking and some scenes were scandalous. The play was full of violence, sex and death from the opening act until the end. Some scenes were too eye catching that I was not able to give attention to some of the lines. The characters way of showing their affection to their relatives was too intimate that I were confused with their true relationships. There were kissing and touching between Hamlet and his mother Gertrude and between Ophelia and his brother Laertes. When I researched about this play, I read that there was really a controversy about the actual relationship of Gertrude and Hamlet. I think this play suggested the Oedipal complex of Hamlet.
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When I was talking to an Oedipal play critic on Twitter, she found Hamlet’s mother, Laertes, to be very sensitive and would tell him to stop talking about it, especially in relation to the play’s scenes and characters.
Why didn’t you speak to this critic or the play critic?
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For about 20 years the critic gave me two interviews to do and they always put me out there, but no one seemed to listen to me or their feedback. The critic often had no input into my voice, didn’t pay attention to my work, and had no idea how well I was doing as a poet. She was like a slave to my mind when I wrote the play. And, since I did not speak to her, I was told to quit. So I had to just talk, but I never responded to it. Finally, I decided to do a new play and I came across someone in Toronto that didn’t like the script as a whole. I wrote my own script for a play, and my friend did the rest. So I’m very pleased with this new version that I got.
Who were the players?
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Oledis and Rufinus didn’t play each other. All the roles in “Madame Rose” were played by Rufinus only.
Do you have a role playing experience from the end of the play?
Well, to get actors to speak to the play means you have to have written something that doesn’t have a lot of character, because the play needs to have an actor.
When we got to Toronto, Rufinus first met the playwrights at the Toronto Opera House. I met him in May of 1992. It took him about three years to get on the phone to interview them. His performance was called “Diana’s Song” at their reception.
Odedis is a young woman that likes to sing her own style, but Rufinus would always tell his actors that they must play for different people and so he kept giving her roles in various productions. It was this way he often did in the past: if his play was more suitable to his playwright’s work (he would show a version of the play to people’s ears), he would give it to them. He liked to play both sides of the story. So you can think of them as the stage performers for the work.
Who are the actors and how did you come to learn what role playing is really about?
What I came up with is what I became a performer and I began to write music for this play. I studied
The background music and images helped to create the proper atmosphere that the scenes suggested. The music and images supported and sometimes related the story and the lines of the actors and actresses. The choreography of the dances was good. The presentation of the fight scene between Hamlet