The Hamlet Gamble.

Theatre  The last Hamlet I reviewed was from Shakespeare's Globe in April 2020, which I was fortunate enough to see via YouTube during lockdown.  Their latest production, from the Sam Wannamaker Playhouse was due to be streamed this month, but they cancelled sighting the cost.  Now the professional reviews are out, I should be pleased.  It sounds horrendous:

"I can just about understand why Holmes introduces a speech from Romeo and Juliet, but not why he replaces the gravediggers’ dialogue with a rambling contemporary improv routine and a singalong of Kenny Rogers’ The Gambler, all performed by the show’s composer/musician Ed Gaughan. This is the most misguided interpretation of the scene since I saw it done in the mid-90s as a rap that ended with the words “now I’m gonna neck Ophelia”."

Here's the key problem with this - it's for people who already know the play. I'm still curious to see it, because any variation from norm is always interesting especially if there's a particular intellectual underpinning. Lord knows, after seeing the play forty-one times in different versions, it's the variations on the main theme which keep it interesting.  It sounds brilliantly awful.

But I shiver to think about the people for whom this could be their first introduction to the play and Shakespeare in general.  Will any of this make any sense?  Isn't adding in lines from Romeo and Juliet simply confusing?  Not to mention my usual annoyance that you wouldn't do this sort of thing to other artforms, so why must Shakespeare's writing continually endure this desecration?  [via]