What are the holidays without everyone’s favourite madman?
On Christmas Day as you stuff your face with bird your relatives fire questions like bullets from a gun. You sit with a ridiculous smile on your face pretending that you really want to be there and that yes you’re happy to answer all of their questions.
“How is what’s-his face? You’re still together? How long has it been — six months a year?” “Yes” you answer. “Yes Yes six months.”
You lie. No you’re not together anymore and you can barely stand to hear his name let alone sit and talk about him for 30 minutes. You want to pull your hair out but instead you just smile.
The tendency to ignore life’s problems during Christmas is what the cast of Christmas Ham(let) a production of Swallow-a-Bicycle Performance Co-Op and Emergency Architect Theatre hopes to crack. “It’s this weird thing. You go back for a family reunion and you start playing these roles you’ve played all through your childhood and adolescence and on into adulthood” says Stephen Kent the actor who plays Hamlet. He was also the understudy for this role at the Stratford Shakespeare festival this summer.
This year he says maybe the audience will leave the theatre questioning these all-too-familiar relationships and instead talk openly with each other. “One of the things I’m learning or appreciating is that Hamlet towards the end of the play finds an openness” says director Jonathan Seinen of Emergency Architect. “Throughout so much he’s fighting he’s seeing the ridiculousness of life…. But at the end he’s finding some simplicity and grace to accept the inevitable which for him is death. That’s helped me to find an acceptance or openness to the ridiculousness of the events in my life or the things that might get me down”
The questions Seinen hopes audiences ask after seeing this show are the same ones raised by Hamlet throughout the play. Although he is pushing 30 Hamlet is really no more than an angst-ridden adolescent trying to come to terms with changes in his life and to find stability. He fights against his mother’s remarriage and his father’s death and he desperately wishes he could pretend that nothing has changed. However by refusing to really talk to Gertrude or Ophelia he ends up hurting those closest to him. He pushes Ophelia away and she refusing to accept this goes crazy fighting for his love.
Kate Bateman who plays Ophelia thinks her character has a “naiveté to her but I think it’s a naiveté that happens to everyone that falls in love for possibly the first real love. You kind of go into it a bit blindly and your heart’s cracked right open.” However says Bateman in this play she and Seinen chose to experiment with the character of Ophelia. She confronts Hamlet forcing him to account for his behaviour and consider how his actions affect both Ophelia and others who love him.
That said while audience members may not leave facing such grave issues as Hamlet does hopefully they will at least reflect on the issues that upset them and leave with the courage to confront these issues. After all if we are not open about our feelings any relationships we have will be tenuous at best. That’s why Kent hopes the play will “allow people to have a more honest Christmas” and repair the frayed threads of any broken relationships.
