Shakespeare in Shorts
24-27 July 2006
To bee or not to bee
It's the end of the 16th century and young William Shakespeare is
having trouble with Hamlet's "to be or not to be"-soliloquy. A rhyme
for "sea"?By trial and error he makes his way through many versions: to
see, to flee, to pear, to pea etc, dramatically aided by his sister
Judith. The solution to his word-finding problems, however, finally
soars in uninvited on two wings.
Shall I compare thee...?
Shakespeare’s sonnets – 154 little dramas thrown together
in loose order but featuring a kind of steady cast: the writer, the
young man, the dark lady and a rival poet. Here they come to life,
acting out their passions and tribulations in verse and in prose
– aided by a well-read narrator and occasionally disturbed by a
desperate anonymous poet, who tries to compose a sonnet that starts
with "Shall I compare thee"; but then ends in a work which is rather
different from Shakespeare's sonnet 18.
The optimized Macbeth
The "Scottish play"– according to an old theatre superstition it
is cursed or bewitched. Allegedly in no other production have there
been so many accidents...So it was tempting to do a Macbeth parody
where everything goes wrong on purpose. The cast is reduced to 10 and
is moreover all female. Plus one grumbling male technician, to whom
goes much of the credit for the disastrous show: witches without a
cauldron, blood of the wrong colour and obnoxious daggers on strings
showing up at wrong moments, etc.
The Hamlet Triangle
What if Hamlet and Ophelia had not died? What if they had gone to
college instead to study psychology to be able to better understand the
disturbances in their families? And what if Romeo and Juliet hadn't
committed suicide but had married secretly and discovered later that
they didn't really like each other?
What if they had started couples-therapy with Hamlet? And what if the
cliché that most therapists start affairs with their female
clients proved true? Then there might indeed be something rotten in the
state of Denmark...
