Review: The Factory's Hamlet, Arch 635

Written for Culture Wars

Even for the most well-drilled company, Hamlet is no mean feat. Exalted to the point of petrifying, bursting at the seams with iconic lines, lofty philosophy and high emotions, it is a three hour wrestle with the human condition. Imagine, then, being cast as the despairing Dane a mere five minutes before your first entrance, armed with only the text as learnt by rote, in a production that no more knows its course than you do. As if that weren’t enough, someone’s just handed you a giant polystyrene skull as your first prop.

The Factory’s Hamlet, clearly, is a gargantuan task. For the past two years an eclectic collective of actors have been conjuring Hamlet anew in different locations. Sometimes they play on a stage, using whatever set happens to be there. Sometimes in a found space. Tonight, we are in a converted railway arch in Clapham with a bar modishly dressed in black and neon. Passing trains rumble overhead piercing the play with ominous bursts of thunder.

It works thus: having each learnt several parts, actors are pitted against one another in bouts of rock, paper, scissors to determine the casting. Audience members provide the props and move between acts to reconfigure the playing space. After a ten-second countdown, it begins.

So it is that the ghost bursts in with a head of molten armour fashioned from tin-foil, that Prince Fortinbras is crowned with a novelty hippo shower-cap and that Hamlet and Laertes engage in a duel of pulling power, having plucked out two audience members for a tragical snog-off. This is no “sterile promontory,” but a world of waxy surrealism: wayward and stalked by madness.

There are, unsurprisingly, both gains and losses in this mode of presentation.

As an audience, our attention is split. Events multiply. We see both the world of the play and the actual space in which it appears; both characters and actors. We immerse ourselves in the story and simultaneously admire the telling of it at one remove. It is as if a version plays out in our heads to which we become emotionally connected even as we disconnect from the one in front of us, amused by the jarring discrepancies of image and text as, say, Hamlet brandishes a dainty fan in threat or Barnardo cowers beneath a cycle helmet.

But, isn’t this what happens in any theatre? Do we not watch the action behind our eyes whilst that before us fails? This honesty marks The Factory’s house-style. Aware of its own ridiculousness, it seems to observe itself scornfully even as it invests with wholehearted earnestness.

With such emphasis on the imagined narrative, the play becomes clearer than ever before – with the exception, tonight, of a frayed third act, which buckles in the tricksy playing space of the bar and the decision to have two actors share the titular role. With images offering little assistance or correspondence, one’s ear tunes in to the text with unusual diligence, pricking at its nuances and repetitions. An unexpected purity, even faithfulness, emerges whereby we receive the text almost as if reading it at our own pace.

Alongside this, the display of choice somehow distils the play. Given the obviousness of what might have been - that is, the continuous sense of parallel worlds and paths not taken – we receive the play almost as an abstract idea. Each attempt seems to contain every possible production. Absent ideas of characters seem to hover over the heads of those embodying them, almost as if we witness the corruption inherent in the process of actualisation. What we see seems to directly reveal the playwright’s original. There can be no directorial intention, no forced interpretation or imposition, just the play as written and the openly messy particulars on which it is carried.

That said, beyond the refreshed perspective, we learn little that we didn’t already know. The Factory rely on our foreknowledge of the play. We are forced to make our own sense, to complete the jigsaw for ourselves. The form itself offers no comment on the content – any text could be tackled similarly without loss. To watch is to discover anew, but also to clarify, refine and confirm ideas already held.

With this loss of directorial intention comes also a weakening of the narrative arc. Individual scenes may become clarified but the sense of structured development of both characters and plot disappears. The sense of impending tragedy never grows in momentum and both Hamlet’s vengeful desires and his madness seem somewhat scattergun as a result, flashing here and there, but often forgotten. With this, the absence of design, there creeps the slightest hint of monotony.

Does the improvisation become wearisome? Perhaps, but only where it does not fizz with inspiration. As the play proceeds we demand more ingenuity and wit of the actors. Not least because, over time, we spot the presence of preconceived tactics. We begin to doubt the total immediacy as momentary decisions seem born of tactics, as if the company have identified ideal openings for something, anything, to be decided upon and determined that some repeated gesture or other is needed to convey a particular thread of ideas, death, for instance, or madness.

However, given the mammoth nature of the task, such tactics are forgivable by virtue of their necessity. It is harder to excuse the inconsistencies of style. Where at times The Factory seek to play scenes according to naturalistic motivations, at others they play to illustrate and at others still to postulate some concept or other. There is also the sense of opportunities missed in their handling of the audience. After all, part of the joy of improv is our role as challenge-setters. The event could benefit from having even less control over itself.

Nonetheless, it works. It could be improved, but it proves enjoyable, exciting and urgent and demonstrates The Factory as a necessary point on the theatrical landscape. The future development of their practice is worth following with a beady eye, as they are a company underpinned by theatrical enquiry providing a rickety, risky bridge between mainstream and experimentation.