With a soundstage and light rig worthy of a larger arena concert, the show’s basic chords are struck with rumble and smoke already when a black-clad Silvana opens the show… sorry, the show, alone in the middle of the empty black Big Stage. The rest of the ensemble is raised from the underground, as if they were the extras, already buried in advance in this eternal play about being or not being.
As for maximalism the set is completely completed. Thunder and grenades, sweet flights, Gothenburg humor, strobe lights, Ebba Grön and a small pornographic doll satire as a play within a play. Annika Hallin’s glittering Queen Gertrud and Peter Andersson’s despotic King Claudius, cold-hammered like any gang leader. Isabelle Kyed’s Ofelia, in tulle and sequins, is a doll, possibly pregnant, in the hands of her protective, male family heads.
The most studied is the apparition, Manuela Gotskozik Bjelke’s full-fledged heavy-metal figure with a throwaway coat, car and a distorted voice urging Silvana-Hamlet to avenge the murder of her father.
Blank verse in Sture Pyks translation is the track on which Silvana Imam slaloms through the performance. The immortal Hamlet quotations become clear and pure in her figure, while the attributed monologues sometimes disappear in soundscape and attitude.
Some slightly brilliant passages have to be lifted after all. Lines like “Where is God when angels die” suggest that Hamlet is a youth as rootless as any of today’s youth lost in vengeful gang fights.
Sunil Munshi does comedy of Shakespeare’s blackest tragedy in a set full of contradictions and few subtleties. The fragile versus the tough, the clear versus the hidden, the light versus the black.
Everything ends, of course, with evil and senseless death, as it must when revenge takes its toll. If Silvana’s Hamlet can remind the world of this futility, I can only applaud.