Sydney Reviews

A hit, a palpable hit, Hamlet Camp is full of wit, palpable wit.

It begins with three poems, autobiographical, lyrical, wry, funny, each presented individually by the author/actor: Skip Retail Therapy by Toby Schmitz, Storage by Brendan Cowell and Ship to Shore by Ewen Leslie.

And so with these erudite, eloquent, enlightening, epic introductions we know something of these three players’ career trajectories, their backgrounds, their impetus, their inspiration.

A brief but beautiful dance piece follows, choreographed and performed by Claudia Haines-Cappeau, an Ophelia beckoning the Prince of Denmark, and soon there they are, the three actors, pyjama clad on stage, bare minimum, chairs minimum set, inmates of Hamlet Camp, a clink, a clinic to purge actors of the altitude sickness caused by the scaling of that Everest of theatrical roles. A shock treatment therapy for thespians.

It’s Toby, or not Toby, that is the question. Ewen and Brendan too, or not. Actors and characters blend in an alchemy of experience and extension, fact and fiction, theatrical license to thrill. These intimates, linked by various and myriad productions and incarnations of the play explore, examine, extrapolate on the text but also the business of acting, of interpretation, the sweat and tears and terror that accompanies the exhilaration of performance, especially this iconic, career pinnacle prince of roles.

There’s the playful, pithy dissing of directors who have visions that are apparitions of the play, not the flesh and bones and blood of the piece, affectations meant to leave a creative stamp but tend to stamp out, stamp on, the core intention of the work. And there’s a playful crack at critics, with bad reviews remembered over good, critical catchphrases like “mercurial” pondered.  

Hamlet Camp is written by its performers, Brendan Cowell, Ewen Leslie and Toby Schmitz and what a piece of work it is, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable. It will Stoppard nothing!

An enterprise of great pith and moment, Hamlet Camp comes trippingly off the tongues of this trio of tyros, a joyous, robust and thoroughly entertaining theatrical event.