I had to think for a while before I wrote something about the Hamlet performance now showing to an audience of mostly high school students in Amsterdam West. That was because I was sitting in the auditorium, on a legendarily uncomfortable stand in a fine frayed-edge breeding ground, among a schoolchildren's audience that sat watching in full attention for almost two hours, while all sorts of theatre connoisseurship problems occurred to me. Problems which, I reflected, all would not have got in the way had the performance not been called Hamlet.
Puritan
I'm not puritanically inclined, that first. I have sometimes found myself in circles of people who believe that every work of performing art should be performed as it was written, which means that we should know Verdi's masterpieces only in a 19th-century setting, with 19th-century costumes and voices, and a 19th-century orchestra. I'm not of that: pieces may well be updated. Indeed: they have to be, if you want to move with the times and the taste of the audience. After all, Verdi himself also adapted old stories into contemporary works for his time.
(That brings me to the sidetrack of sensitivity readers, which are now under fire from people who believe that a publisher should never be allowed to change anything in a text once published and printed. That that process includes forms of chastening is of all times. Until a few years ago, only no one crowed about it).
Everybody dead
Back to that Hamlet in Amsterdam West. Translator and adaptor Abdelkader Benali has done something with the original story about a Danish prince who (as was fashionable in the theatre of Shakespeare's time) must avenge his father's murder in a gruesome bloodbath, but - and this was Shakespeare's innovation - doubts the necessity of that perpetual cycle of revenge. Tragically, he cannot avoid '#everybodydies (™)'.
To make it accessible to an unintroduced and young audience living in the rough climate of Amsterdam West, the play has been extensively modernised. That modernisation mainly concerns the 'plot' and the characters. Shakespeare's Denmark is a developer's pit in Amsterdam West. Hamlet's family is not a royal house on Elsinör, but a club of real estate chasers. Hamlet is a North African boy with nothing but good intentions, Laertes a neo-fascist and his sister Ophelia a vlogging climate activist with a screw loose.
Seven quarters
With such a cast of characters, well played by a finely diverse ensemble, in which Sabri Saad el Hamus excels as a dead king and a living usurper, alongside a sometimes low-energy Sabri Saddik in the title role, the audience remains well engaged, and for 16-year-olds, 7 quarters of an hour is a huge part of your life, so that's saying something.
Where it started to bother me was the mountainous spectacle of hairpin bends in which writer Benali and director Paul Knieriem should have turned to bring that old story, with ghost apparitions, curtains and letters being brought up, plus gravediggers, somewhat believably to now.
Raging
It raised a few questions, which I'd like to put to the two makers at some point. For instance, for several days now, the question has kept me wondering why they didn't take a much freer approach to the basic material? Why not write their own all-new story, loosely inspired by Shakespeare's Hamlet? You wouldn't call it Hamlet then, of course, just as West Side Story isn't called Romeo and Juliet either, but it would have given so much more freedom to really let loose on a story about gentrification, racism and honour killings.
These are themes that are hugely topical and deserve a story of their own, firmly grounded, of course, on the shoulders of giants like Shakespeare.
Boomers like me would then not have gotten into trouble with their historical knowledge, and adolescents in West would not have had to copen With ghost apparitions in a construction site.
I hope to put the question, why was the title Hamlet chosen after all, with all its improbabilities, to both makers. In a podcast.
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