Back to the Fringe (Part II)

A second offering at the Rochester Fringe Festival included a bit of Hamlet.  The title of the production was "Merely Players."  The festival program described the show thus.

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players…”  Join us in exploring the complex relationships among iconic Shakespearean men and women through mask work, pantomime, scene work and puppetry.

It was unclear who "us" was; there was no playbill introducing the cast or the production company.  Even the accompanying photo in the festival program, reproduced below, left much unanswered.  All members of the six-person cast wore black, and the one major prop as such was a chair that was used for a few of the scenes.  Each scene save one was introduced by two members of the cast, who described the portrayal of the man and woman we were about to see.

Among the repertoire was Act III, Scene iv of Hamlet.  It was an adapted version of the bedroom scene between Hamlet and Gertrude.  For a show investigating the relationship between the sexes, this scene fit very well.  It was edited so that it included only Hamlet and Gertrude; Polonius and the ghost of Hamlet's father were mentioned but did not appear.

The scene was staged in a decidedly offbeat fashion.  The dialogue was fed through the sound system from offstage, perhaps a pre-recorded reading by two members of the cast.  The "action" onstage involved two puppets.  Basically they were masks attached to pieces of fabric.  Three cast members worked each puppet:  one for each hand and one for the body/head.  It was a strange presentation.  The cast did their best to make the puppets display the emotion of the scene, but the unchanging expressions of the masks worked against them.

Overall, this had to be one of the oddest additions to the Hamlet collection.  It was definitely a "Huh?" moment, suitable for a quick viewing and a quick recap for the blog.