#the hamletmachine

On the whole, show week was a success. Yes, a few people flubbed over lines, yes, we had a few technical difficulties, and yes, we had a fire alarm go off in the middle of our closing night performance, but what theatre show is always perfect?

We muddled through and came out the other side rather victorious. As we had expected, the audience had next to no clue what the show was a bout, but for the most part, they enjoyed it.

From an actor’s perspective, there were of course some improvements I could have made, like rehearsing the “to be or not to be speech” more, with a distraction in the background, because when it came to performing it, I found myself teetering fairly close to being distracted and forgetting my lines.

From a technical perspective on the sound department, we could have somehow attempted to polish up the microphones and how they picked up outside sounds, right from the beginning. As it turned out, our technical supervisor had to solve that problem without us, and so that aspect may reflect badly on us as a department. However, I think we completed most, if not all, of the other tasks we set ourselves out to do, with a great end result.

I enjoyed my time working on this production, and I also hope the rest of my department did as well.

Above we can see the elusive murder of Hamlets, taking a break from their daily vengeance against uncles-cum-kings. Normally a bitter and emotional creature, here we can see the rarely seen collective of Hamlets (sometimes pronounced Hamlé) relaxing and enjoying some frivolity amongst each other.

Today’s rehearsal finalised the movement piece to Bowie’s Starman and polished up some of the final scenes of our play. I was told during the working on our movement pieces that the idea had arisen last rehearsal for my partner in a section of the piece to dip me, which should be highly entertaining from the rest of the class’s point of view. A queer inigma, if you will: a gay man playing a woman, romantically dipping a gay woman playing a man. Like two negatives of a magnet trying to work together. Groundbreaking.

As we muddle along, it is now a process of sorting through the scenes to pick out what we like and what we don’t (we being our director), and to see scenes fit together like a puzzle. It is a very fun process to watch unravel and to be part of; I’m still very excited to be in this show, and so I don’t feel as though it will be losing it’s magic any time soon.

We also changed our profile pictures and headers to promote the show, and they look spectacular, so well done to our publicity team :)