Theatre preview
las, poor Yorick! I knew him . . . ”
It’s the beginning of one of theatre’s best-known quotes from one of Shakespeare’s most performed tragedies, with as many different takes on the famous line as there have been actors playing Hamlet.
When Hamlet holds up the skull of a former court jester, a man whom he knew and loved, it begins — continues — a musing on the absolute ordinariness but terror of death. Depending on your frame of mind, the scene could well send you into a panic attack as you look at Hamlet holding poor Yorick’s skull and realise that, one day, someone might do the same with your own.
It doesn’t sound like a particularly promising beginning for a play — a musical no less — that wants to be funny and uplifting, but it’s perfect for the challenge Wellington-based theatre-makers Binge Culture sets itself.
Written and now performed, Yorick! is a musical where four performers set out on an “optimistic quest” to understand mortality. Director Joel Baxendale says the company’s relatively youthful members started talking about what would be the most difficult subject to tackle on stage about three years ago. Dying and death, they concluded. “We don’t talk about death much at all, nor do we tackle the issues around it, like palliative care or how to look after the elderly members of our society,” he says. “We don’t even want to say the word and that’s to the detriment of everyone. Maybe if Yorick! June 12-23 Loft at Q Theatre;
we learned to deal with it properly, it might just give us more appreciation for life.”
From those conversations, they started thinking about the “absolute opposite” of death and, somewhat strangely, decided the answer wasn’t life but musicals. Baxendale says introducing music seemed like a good way to talk about a dark subject in a way that didn’t make people feel terrible.
But given the enormity of the topic, boundaries needed to be put around it. Hamlet, especially pulling apart the final act, provided a starting point for