Hamlet

Neil Coppen’s Hamlet was born out of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa, which necessitated several lengthy national lockdowns that saw many of the country’s cultural institutions, like those in other parts of the world, deprived of social and financial support. The Klein Karoo National Arts Festival (KKNK) website, on which this one-off online reading was hosted, explains that Hamlet was due to run at the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town in 2020, but with the onset of the pandemic and the resultant closure of the Fugard—a devastating loss to the South African theater world which broke the hearts of many—the production turned into an online reading. As a pandemic-influenced online production of Shakespeare in South Africa, the reading was not the first of its kind. In 2020, the ShakespeareZA project (reviewed in SB 38.3) supported the performances of a series of Shakespearean monologues presented online by actors from across South Africa. Like these earlier online performances, Coppen’s Hamlet proved to be a compelling demonstration of how digital mediums can be used to keep South African performances of Shakespeare alive in an unstable pandemic world.

On entering the host website, audiences were met with two messages that were alternating against the black screen, which served as the backdrop for the play. The first message dutifully indicated that the actors and IT team were in their respective homes preparing for the online reading to begin, while the second offered a witty cautionary note about both the temperamental nature of technology and the eeriness of the play ahead in the brief statement: “Anything can happen . . .” This strategy of communicating to the audience by using text on the black screen was employed throughout the reading to identify times and locations in the play. The start of the reading was accordingly signaled by the fading of the welcome messages, as the words “Prologue, The Funeral” were typed onto the screen.

Before any actors appeared, the narrator set the scene for the reading by describing to us how these first moments of the play might have looked in a theater. Stage props included a faintly lit, “mounted Kudu head” hanging mid-air, and a “coffin dressed in a South African flag” positioned center stage. As the audience entered, they would have seen a gravedigger standing in a pit, smoking a cigarette, listening to “Zulu Gospel music” as he shoveled earth. The speaker proceeded to describe the emergence of the company of actors from the wings of the stage “dressed as dignitaries,” including “Kings, Chiefs, Government officials” and members of the “SADF” (South African Defence Force). Then, as the “house lights” dimmed, both men and women from the group on stage would have been singing and praying, and the characters of Gertrude, Hamlet, and Claudius would have become apparent from their position in the funeral procession. The narration spoken at the opening of the play made it clear that this was not simply going to be a reading of the original play-text, but also an imaginative “reading” of the theatrical performance originally envisioned by the director. The narrator became a fixed feature of the production and regularly embellished scenes with details of characters’ actions and settings.

The set that audiences were invited to imagine in the prologue also highlighted the most defining feature of the production, namely its setting in contemporary South Africa. The Danish court was reimagined as a “South African Royal/Political dynasty,” as Coppen himself describes it in the promotional content included on the KKNK host site. Specifically, here the dynasty was of Zulu ethnicity, which became evident as the characters began code-switching between English and Zulu from the first scenes of the play. Though most of the play was read in English, actors used Zulu especially when saying prayers or referencing deities, addressing family members, and for making impassioned exclamations.

Hamlet’s encounter with the ghost of his late father fit seamlessly into this new context, as the ghost of the King of Denmark transformed into the ancestral spirit of a Zulu King; the play drew on the widely held Zulu reverence for elders and deceased ancestors, as well as the traditional belief in their power to intervene in worldly affairs as spirits. Characters also made their ancestors offerings in the play: Hamlet, for example, did so at the end of the reading of act one, scene five, where he poured some of his drink on the ground as an offering to the spirit of his father. These ideas were alluded to again towards the end of the production when Hamlet came across the gravedigger. Instead of seeing the skull of the King’s jester Yorick, this Hamlet found instead the skull of his gogo (grandmother) Yonela, whom Hamlet thought on fondly, shortly before catching sight of Ophelia’s funeral procession. On encountering the remains of the late Yonela, Hamlet began to describe the qualities of this elder to Horatio, before gazing into the distance as the narrator guided the audience to picture a tender scene, which would have been staged in-person as Hamlet’s memory, of Yonela singing a lullaby to the baby Hamlet who was tied to her back with a blanket. The effortless way that the characters moved between languages in their readings and the ease with which traditional Zulu elements could be substituted for motifs in the original play-text were important reminders of the efficacy of adaptation as a means of enabling cultural groups in the Global South to productively reinvent and thus lay claim to Shakespeare.

Hamlet (Anelisa Phewa) and the Ghost (Wiseman Sithole) in Hamlet, dir. Neil Coppen. Daniel Galloway Consulting (DGC), 2021.

Screengrab by Hassana Moosa, with permission of DGC.

In creating the play’s specifically contemporary South African identity, the director also introduced an interesting theme to the reading by highlighting the use of intoxicants amongst younger characters in the play. Such references were especially prevalent in scenes involving Hamlet and Ophelia. For example, when Hamlet delivered his first lines of speech in the production, the narrator described Hamlet sitting on a toilet with a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue whiskey at his feet. Later, when Rosen-crantz and Guildenstern were summoned to the court, they approached Hamlet with beer and a “banky,” or a transparent plastic bag of marijuana, with which they tempted him before trying to determine the cause of his afflictions. Social drugs also featured in Ophelia’s first dialogue of the reading, which occurred when the gender-swapped Laertes took her sister aside into a bathroom at the wedding of Gertrude and Claudius to share her concerns about Hamlet. (“The Wedding” represented the setting of the reading for the duration of the first act). As Laertes and her sister Ophelia engaged in “girl talk,” the pair applied make-up, took selfies, and sniffed lines of cocaine.

In turn, substance (ab)use appeared to be aligned with the madness and depression that plagued both Hamlet and Ophelia in the latter part of the production. In Hamlet’s case, this was suggested when the Prince, after having just killed Polonius, encountered his late father’s spirit while in the company of his mother. Gertrude criticized the “bodiless creature ecstasy” that was causing Hamlet to hallucinate, changing the word “creation” (3.4.136) in the play-text to “creature.” Given the noticeable allusions to drugs in earlier moments of the reading, as well as the characters’ emphasis on the word in the scene, the term “ecstasy” seemed to take on a new, literal meaning, which led me to consider whether Gertrude believed that her son’s seeming decline into madness was a result of his recreational drug use. Thereafter, in a short, dialogue-free scene which showed Ophelia mourning her father’s death, the character drank a glass of wine in front of the camera as the narrator described how she emptied a bottle of sleeping pills into her hand and sank to the floor while contemplating her plight. The references to drugs and alcohol served as indicators of the indulgence of the royal household, and simultaneously highlighted contemporary issues of youth culture, mental health, and substance abuse in South Africa. At the same time, the inclusion of such substances, which were easy to represent, move, and replicate in the spaces of different actors, was an innovative technique for introducing stage properties to the reading and evoking the feeling of an in-person performance through the confines of the online “stage.”

Despite the many successes of this online production, the limitation of the digital medium nonetheless became apparent at some points of the play, and especially during the readings of the scenes from act four depicting Ophelia’s madness, which highlighted her desolation. These were some of the most dramatically powerful and technically interesting parts of the reading. Playing Ophelia, Buhle Ngaba engaged creatively with the camera in these scenes, receding backwards, and effectively disappearing, into the black background to reflect the character’s despair, and then advancing closely towards the camera to express frustration. Ophelia passed imaginary balloons instead of flowers to her companions on screen, and as she moved her hand and body towards the camera to address each of the different characters, each actor softly touched their fingers to the camera as though to receive the offering. Later, when Gertrude informed the others about Ophelia’s death (4.7.161–88), Ophelia appeared indistinctly behind a camera covered in a semi-translucent green fabric wrap, which gave the sense of her lifeless body underwater. The narrator frequently intervened in these scenes to provide supplementary details, and, though useful in painting a picture of the imagined performance, these descriptions disrupted the flow of the acting taking place onscreen, and made it difficult to become fully immersed in the heavy emotions evoked by the dying Ophelia and the other characters. During these scenes, I was most conscious that, though using online spaces was a formidable way of trying to simulate a theatrical experience in a shared physical space, performance on digital platforms could never really substitute for the real thing.

Still, as a homesick South African watching the play from London, the reading felt wonderfully familiar to me. Not since 2006, when Janet Suzman brought her Baxter Theatre production to Stratford-upon-Avon as part of the RSC’s Complete Works Festival, has there been a notable South African Hamlet presented in the UK. Notwithstanding the constraints imposed on the performance by the digital format, I felt a sense of optimism about the scope for using new technologies to make South African productions of Shakespeare more accessible to global audiences. Coppen’s experimental, bilingual, online Hamlet represented what seemed to me to be a fresh South African reworking of the play and one that displayed some of the exciting possibilities of adaptation, both cultural and technological.