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Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy never makes an appearance in Fat Ham: but the questions it poses run through the whole of James Ijames’s gorgeous, tender and irrepressible response to Shakespeare’s great tragedy. And where the original ends with a great many souls plunging into not being, Ijames and his characters . . . make a different choice. It’s an affectionate and joyous take that sees the younger generation messily but firmly rebel against the tragic path scoped out for them and peel themselves away from inherited trauma.
Ijames’s play has already triumphed both on and off Broadway and won a Pulitzer Prize. Now it arrives for its European premiere with the RSC in Shakespeare’s hometown, and in a theatre that has seen countless melancholy Danes brood over their fate. Rather than a relocation of the original, this is a new play that takes the bare bones of the Bard’s plot and stands them up again in a new setting, the main players emerging in new guises. Unfolding at a family cookout in North Carolina, it’s written in the rich, poetic vernacular of the South, wittily laced with snippets of Shakespeare’s text and a couple of key soliloquies. What’s so joyous about it is the way Ijames honours the deep dilemmas in Hamlet but grapples with them afresh.
It’s also very funny. Here Elsinore has become a backyard in the throes of wedding celebrations for Tedra (Andi Osho) and Rev (Sule Rimi), who happens to be brother to Tedra’s previous husband, Pap. Pap shuffled off this mortal coil in prison, where he literally got it in the neck — stabbed by another inmate. Juicy, our Hamlet figure — brilliantly played by Olisa Odele — is busy blowing up balloons to celebrate his weirdly dysfunctional new family arrangement. Suddenly, up pops Pap’s ghost, complete with white smoke, spooky lighting, stories of murder and a demand that Juicy now butcher his uncle like a hog (the family run a barbecue restaurant and there’s a wealth of ham-based humour in the piece). The illusions, from Skylar Fox, are both absurd and magical.
To say Juicy is taken aback is putting it mildly. A quietly thoughtful and deeply alienated young Black man, he’s already struggling with being queer, sensitive and studious in an environment that prizes tough masculinity. He just wants to study human resources. The situation is, as his philosophical mate Tio (a very droll Kieran Taylor-Ford) puts it, “a pickle”. But as the play zips towards its conclusion (at 100 minutes, it’s rather shorter than Hamlet), Juicy finds a way to turn the “softness” and gentleness he’s mocked for into a strength.
Director Sideeq Heard (associate director on the New York productions) and his terrific new cast relish the playfulness of the piece, mischievously breaking the fourth wall and neatly reminding us that their characters too are playing allotted roles. Juicy, Larry (Corey Montague-Sholay) and Opal (a wonderfully surly take on Ophelia from Jasmine Elcock) liberate themselves by rebelling, but they also free their elders from playing up to stereotype.
Beneath all the mayhem, the karaoke and the charades, runs a moving account of self-definition, as both Juicy and Larry — Laertes reconfigured as a traumatised, closeted marine — grapple their way to a different future. It’s about Black identity, queer identity, masculinity and the legacy of history, but it’s also about the way narrative can shape our understanding of what we value. And it has at its centre a beautiful, sincere and very loveable Hamlet/Juicy in Odele.
★★★★★
To September 13, rsc.org.uk
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