Mesmerising puppetry unleashes power of ‘Hamlet’
‘You are seeing the essentials of who Hamlet is,’ director says
Literature was one of my least favourite subjects at high school and I dreaded the Shakespearean plays in particular.
I was also entirely unfamiliar with puppetry.
But I was captivated for the entire two hours and more of Janni Younge’s production of Hamlet, in which she uses lifesize puppets to bring William Shakespeare’s timeless play to life.
The show premiered at the National Arts Festival. It features Western Cape actors Mongi Mthombeni and Siyamthanda Sinani as Hamlet, with Andrew Buckland as Claudius and Roshina Ratnam as Queen Gertrude.
The production is beautifully textured and layered, with the visuals and emotions clearly depicted by the puppets.
The cast of humans and puppet creatures is coiled, tangled, meshed together.
Commanded by the ghost of his father to avenge his death, Hamlet grapples with the value of life and what it means to set things right.
Director Younge said: “Hamlet’s conflict is very much within himself; about what it means to be human and the responsibilities of being human, as well as how to face the past and his future.
“His love life is conflicted by his purpose of trying to right the wrong done by his uncle.
“The interconnectedness of choice is something we feel strongly in Hamlet’s character, amid the effect of his father’s command.”
This is an important story for South Africans — it creates a space to consider how we affect each other; how we are shaped by our past and have to confront ourselves before we can properly embrace our future.
“Hamlet is suited to puppetry because it has this thing of the body and the soul being torn apart,” the director said.
“Ophelia actually loses her mind. One of the central questions in Hamlet is: Is Hamlet psychotic? Or is he in deep anguish and grief?
“The audience is left with these questions after this play.
“For me puppetry is a medium which allows you to work with the body and which informs the body in many different forms.
“We removed all the political drama out of the story.
“It is effectively about half of the original script.
“In this production, you are seeing the essentials of who Hamlet is, in the cut that we have made.”
Younge said the puppet heads were made from polystyrene with inserted wooden mallets.
“The surface is hessian. Everything is hessian-covered in different textures of hessian, some of it dyed.”
Worn-out ropes dangle from the ceiling on the stage.
The clothes of the puppets become tangled with the bodies to depict connection and portray the raw emotions of the story.
“[There are] fibres of connection which weave us and our relationships together,” Younge said.
“The threads represent the entanglement that is beautifully woven together — the fibres of our beings that emerge from our subconscious and everything which is behind us.”