Sydney Reviews

Hamlet is not healthy, not developed enough to know about affection and love. Also he is a coward, a smouldering blonde brooder and bully boy, a university attendee, yet an ill educated sophist, his philosophical piffle concerning virginity and the nature of the female a pillar of the patriarchy.

Ophelia sees this, feels this, knows this, yet pines for his attentions. Something is truly rotten in the state of Denmark.

Jean Betts’ Ophelia Thinks Harder is Shakespeare’s Hamlet re-imagined. This is Shakespeare shaken, stirred, sieved, a cocktail of interplay, borrowing from and lending to Hamlet, Macbeth, The Tempest, The Taming of the Shrew, Julius Caesar, The Sonnets and more. Half the fun is picking the quote and matching the play, a compound interest of the dramatic dividend.

Liberties and license are taken with the original narrative; Laertes gets short shrift with Claudius reduced to clownish cameo. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are a pair of jaunty cross dressers and Polonius takes on ghost duty. Joan of Arc makes an appearance and there’s more than a whiff of the weird sisters from Glamis and Cawdor.

Set Designers Hannah Yardley and Jimi Rawlings have excelled with an altar to the Virgin Mary adorned with lighted candles, a waxing lyrical image of the something wick’d this play becomes.

Brea Macey makes a feisty Ophelia, philosophically feminist but floored and flattened by her attraction to Hamlet, trapped in the bad boy trope.

Eleni Cassimatis as Ophelia’s maid and confidante, is stoically, strikingly strong, while Lucy Miller is vibrant and fabulously flinty as Gertrude and ethereal as the ghost of Ophelia’s mother.

Shaw Cameron shines as the boisterous, brawny, misogynist prince, privileged predator and manipulator of Horatio’s homo-erotic yearnings, striding the stage with a dangerous energy and cutting comic precision.

Director Alex Kendall Robson delivers a rambunctious revel. If amusement be the fuel of play, he gives surfeit.