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HAMLET!… The Dress Rehearsal, an original comedy production written and directed by Luke Collins, ran on the 7th and 8th December in the International Bar, Wicklow Street. The play follows the hapless director Luke Corcoran and his attempts to stage a production of Shakespeare’s daunting tragedy. Luke Collins, the actual director, introduces the performance, and the first bit of metatheatrical comedy comes as the two Lukes square off for rights to the theatre space and get us off to an entertaining start.
The metatheatrics (and general theatrics) continue as we are introduced to a cast of larger-than-life (admittedly stock) characters – Adam Redmond’s method-acting Hamlet, Claire Harrison’s hungover Ophelia and Philip James’ movie buff Claudius. The characters interact with the “space” and the audience (who they maintain are only seeing the disastrous dress rehearsal of a performance tomorrow night), but the play’s most frequent source of comedy is the plain ineptitude of its fictional actors and director. Indeed, Corcoran’s straight-man director seems as ludicrously inept as his actors, who frequently augment their lines to take stabs at each other, much to the delight of the audience and the exasperation of the director.
Collins’ play shows plenty of promise and each of his actors – particularly the versatile Adam Redmond – clearly enjoys this opportunity to rethink a great play and the process of performance itself. Though moments of real hilarity are certainly achieved, the play is perhaps a little too static to really keep an audience engaged consistently throughout its sixty-minute runtime. The script shows a keen engagement with Shakespeare’s original play but perhaps is not sufficiently innovative in its comedy, with the characterisation in particular relying too much on well-established comedy tropes as opposed to presenting us with new comedic formulae.
A definite “work-on” for Collins and his cast, HAMLET!… The Dress Rehearsal will, this reviewer hopes, reappear in some form in theatres or on screens in the near future.
