The Hamlet Apocalypse

MELBOURNE FRINGE 2009
The Hamlet Apocalypse
The Danger Ensemble and Anniene Stockton
26 September 2009
La Mama Theatre

I don’t want to call favourites on the opening weekend of the Fringe, but The Hamlet Apocalypse proves that the experience of theatre can be something we can’t explain and something that defies mere words.

Six actors are spending the night before the end if their world rehearsing a play. There could be no other choice than that one with a play within the play, where everyone dies and that forces the cast to contemplate that they are soon not to be.

Under the taut direction of Steven Mitchell Wright, The Danger Ensemble (who have been gallivanting the globe with Amanda Palmer) have devised a telling of Hamlet that captures the soul of this greatest of great works and intertwines it with a story so personal and intense that I had to remind myself to breathe.

Developed using a disciplined mix of the Japanese Butho and Suzuki (Tadashi) techniques, this telling is about emotion and essence. Although we hear moments of Shakespeare’s perfect text (yes I love Hamlet), the words are almost meaningless, as the emotion and the heart of the story is expressed physically. I’ve seen many Hamlets, but this is the first time I’ve gasped at the finality of ‘To be or not to be’. These storytelling techniques let us feel the emotion of a story in our hearts before our brains catch up and think about the words. Shakespeare might well have abandoned words had there been a Butoh troupe in Stratford.

As the evening heads towards its climax, the line between their Denmark and their reality blurs and melds. Hamlet has to reject Ophelia, but Lloyd loves Tora; Polonius has lost a daughter, but Peta knows that she will never have children.

The six face their end together but alone and perhaps they hope that there is a Horatio in the audience to tell their tale and a Fortinbras to bear them away with honour.

The intimacy of La Mama intensifies experience of The Hamlet Apocalypse, so make the most of this season before this contemplative and shiny find is grabbed by festivals everywhere.

More 2009 Fringe reviews.

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.

En Trance

En Trance
Yumi Umiumare
Malthouse Theatre
27 August 2009
Tower Theatre, CUB Malthouse

En Trance is a gut-felt provocation of passion and emotion that re-defines our understanding of Butoh. If you’re already amazed by Yumi Umiumare’s extraordinary burlesque cabaret, her first solo show cannot be missed.

As words are almost redundant in a Butoh performance, it’s difficult to find enough of them to capture the experience. Perhaps it’s best not to try and understand, because it’s not about conscious thoughts and intellect. Leave logic at the door and just watch, listen and experience it with your instinct and those parts of you that make you feel without understanding why. The performers know what they have created; the audience are there to feel the results.

En Trance is a Butoh-inspired solo work where Umiumare’s extreme and controlled physicality flows from sublime to grotesque and from human to alien, as she takes us from the perceived chaos of a Tokyo street to the apparent serenity of an Australian river, and leaves us caught between unexplained joy and hints of despair.

Now established as a contemporary art form, Butoh developed in Japan in the 1950s and 1960s as a rejection of western ballet traditions and a subversion of traditional Japanese performance. My only experience of a Butoh class was in the 1980s where Nigel Kellaway made us stomp (‘toh’ means stomp in Japanese) for hours and reduce a Greek tragedy scene into a moment to repeat and re-create. Butoh doesn’t remove unnecessary expression, rather it takes the whole and distils it into something so pure and potent that it would be unpalatable if swallowed in one gulp. I was crap at it, but left beginning to understand how a performer’s physical connection to a space, a text and an experience can create that unexplainable visceral reaction for their audience.

Umiumare’s performance is physically and emotionally astonishing, and enhanced by a team of co-creators (Bambang Nurcahyadi – digital painting, Naomo Ota – design, Ian Kitney – sound , David Anderson – costume, Kerry Ireland – lighting and Moira Finucane – dramaturgy) whose individual perfection never distracts.

The only distracting element is sight line problems, so make sure you get in early and sit in the middle section.

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.

Photo by Jeff Busby.