Brevity, wit, songs play part in Bard adaptation

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This article was published 24/10/2024 (376 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Before it was cast, before it was even written, Hamlet: The Modern Players’ Guide began with a director’s blurry vision of a silhouette.

“I had this image of an actor, standing solo, wearing black, with a guitar in his hands,” says Rodrigo Beilfuss, the artistic director of Shakespeare in the Ruins.

The actor was in a black-box theatre vastly different than the company’s normal outdoor playground at the Trappist Monastery Ruins in St. Norbert.

“It was clearly a Hamletian image.”

Soon, Beilfuss was chatting with the Gargoyle Theatre’s Andrew Davidson about future collaborations, and not too long after, Davidson was at work with actor and playwright Duncan Cox on a solo musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s longest work, condensed into an hour-long show that could be packed up and driven across the province as the company’s first touring production since before the pandemic.

Davidson, a bestselling author who established the Gargoyle Theatre in 2022, has loved Hamlet since he was a theatre and literature student at the University of Manitoba in the 1980s.

“I’m also old enough to remember the Keanu Reeves (production at Manitoba Theatre Centre in 1995).”

Cox, a co-founder of Walk&Talk Theatre Company who’s performed at Rainbow Stage and Manitoba Theatre for Young People, took more time to feel welcome in Elsinore.

“When I was in my third year at the U of W, we studied bits and pieces of it to memorize and use as text for other things…” he says.

“We typically got about four to five lines into ‘To be or not to be’ and then started again.”

But then Cox’s class took on Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead — an adjacent script so enjoyable that it inspired the young artist to reconsider the original.

Davidson and Cox, who collaborated on the Modern Players’ Guide book and lyrics, took that lesson of enriched understanding to heart in their adaptation.

“There’s a line on the first page, I think — well, I know, we wrote it — that goes, ‘If you’re familiar with the play, and it’s all right if you’re not,’” says Cox.

“We hemmed and hawed over the phrasing, but ultimately it meant that this show is for everybody. We’re just telling a story that we’re all going to understand together.”

“It was very important for Andrew when he was writing the first draft that it does have bridges, and that it helps young minds to not only understand the plot but also Shakespeare as an entity,” Beilfuss says.

“But because the play is so well-known, we also felt that it was good to take it off its pedestal and mess around with it.

“Because the play is so well-known, we also felt that it was good to take it off its pedestal and mess around with it.”–Rodrigo Beilfuss

“It was important to go at the maximum in terms of canonical, almost biblical Shakespearean texts and then undercut it, to say that it’s just a play. You can make it with sock puppets in your basement and you will not be doing Shakespeare a disservice.”

While the production kicks off with a five-show stand at the Gargoyle, it was also essential for the collaborators to ensure the play could fit in a van and could run without a hitch during a 20-school tour this fall. (Any schools interested in hosting can contact SiR for more information.)

“It’s very agile and full of a sense of play, in that the stage is filled with mannequins, costume pieces, and bits and bobs of makeshift props,” Beilfuss says.

“Hamlet has seven soliloquies and Duncan has turned them into original songs that use both the original text and newly written lyrics.

“You see one actor play all of the main roles, endowing simple objects with character. A bouquet of flowers becomes Ophelia, a scarf becomes Laertes, and Duncan transforms himself into all those characters.”

“A bouquet of flowers becomes Ophelia, a scarf becomes Laertes, and Duncan transforms himself into all those characters.”–Rodrigo Beilfuss

For Davidson, who grew up in Pinawa, the touring aspect hits close to home.

“I remember almost 40 years ago seeing (the Governor General’s Award-winning solo musical) Billy Bishop Goes to War at school, and it still sticks with me,” he says.

Beilfuss points out that Shakespeare’s roots are in theatrical touring; not only did the Bard’s company travel the provinces of rural England, but his father was known to host travelling companies in Stratford-upon-Avon.

As a child, Beilfuss says, Shakespeare saw revenge dramas, uproarious comedies and even a show called The Taming of a Shrew.

“This is a tradition completely connected to four centuries ago,” he says.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com