Tragic (when my mother married my uncle)
Tragic (when my mother married my uncle)
Cumbernauld Theatre
Neil Cooper
A sulky teenager dressed in black sprawls aloft the raised platform of his bunk-bed, going through his photo album on his iPad, which projects enlargements on a big screen on the other side of the room.
Everyone's in there; his mum, his best mates, one of his kind-of girlfriend's selfies. Most significantly are the portraits of the boy's dad, who died the week before, and his uncle, whom his mum just married.
As the boy lays bare his plans to stab his uncle in revenge for the killing of his dad, it becomes clear he is a contemporary version of Hamlet, and that the pictures projected in his room are of his mum Gertrude, his best pal Horatio and his squeeze Ophelia. Then there is his uncle, Claudius, whom he calls Uncle C.
This is a neat trick in Iain Heggie's fresh look at the Bard, performed with youthful confidence by Sean Purden Brown in Heggie's own production for Subway Theatre Company in association with Sico Productions. Developed through improvisations with drama students at Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Tragic takes Shakespeare's complex verse and renders it in a demotic that, while still poetically vivid, is easy enough for young actors to deliver and for audiences to get to grips with without ambiguity.
Overdone this could be patronising for all concerned, but over 75 minutes it becomes as current as the version of Shakespeare's original currently running at the Citizens Theatre.
In his determined but ultimately self-destructive confessional, the figure presented by Heggie and Purden Brown is as much Holden Caulfield as Hamlet, and the play both his diary and his last words and testament.
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