The Rest Is Silence by Dreamthinkspeak

Whilst staying true to Shakespeare’s tragic tale, Dreamthinkspeak’s The Rest is Silence offers audience members a genuinely unique, immersive experience of Hamlet. 

http://caravanshowcase.org.uk/dreamthinkspeak/

Having read about the company’s tendency to deconstruct plays, I wandered curiously into the black box room, (surrounded on all sides by windows), expecting to be presented with abstract fragments of Shakespeare’s great play. This was not what turned out to be on offer. Dreamthinkspeak’s performance abridged the original text, it reorganised, re-ordered and collapsed divisions between scenes. However, the story remained at the forefront of the show, lovingly and honestly re-told through clearly presented vignettes distilled from Shakespeare’s epic tragedy.

I love Shakespeare and I love Hamlet, but, for me, because the play centres almost exclusively on the melancholic bard, it can prove overly gloomy and repetitious. Adding to these problems, the success of the play has meant that the story itself has become tired and clichéd. Dreamthinkspeak hurdled these significant obstacles, not by offering their own, remoulded version of the play, but by revealing the perspectives, thoughts and feelings of characters, lost behind the morbid personality of the bard in the original text.

Each window in the set unveiled a scene within the hidden kingdom hinted at in Shakespeare’s play. Thus, we were presented with the drunken frivolities of Claudius, partying with Gertrude; the dumbfounded reaction of Rosencrantz and Guidenstern having witnessed Hamlet’s madness; we were party to the preparations of Claudius, readying himself to address his nation after the death of their former king; and we witnessed the love-struck desolation of Ophelia, tormented by the inconstant Hamlet. No lines were added to the script, but the inclusion of these scenes added colour to the text, helping to illuminate the larger world that effected and was effected by the actions of the unhappy prince.

http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/the-rest-is-silence/

Passing repeatedly over this strange world  was the figure of Hamlet’s dead father, tormenting those who had done him wrong, racking them with guilt, and pressing his distressed son to avenge him. At times his image was projected across multiple windows, walking eerily through a forest. At other times his appearance within scenes, though unrecognised by the other characters, functioned like a catalyst, stirring and upsetting the characters.Thus Dreamthinkspeak painted Hamlet’s father, not Claudius, as the rotten core at the heart of Denmark. The corruption, according to the company, lay not in the vile deeds enacted by Claudius, but in the inability of each character to forgive and forget these deeds.

The Rest is Silence may well irritate hardcore Shakespeare fans, who believe that the works of the bard ought never to be tampered with, and that a director’s role is to slavishly reproduce Shakespeare’s plays exactly as they were written and as they were intended to be performed. For the open minded audience member however, and for those who are willing to find new ways to engage with Shakespeare and his great texts, this performance is an absolute must see.

9.5/10