It wouldn’t be the Edinburgh fringe without at least one new spin on Hamlet. This spunky 60-minute version created by Sam Landa and Emma Owens combines a radically trimmed text with aerial acrobatics, tumbling and clowning. Sensitively delivering Shakespearean verse and executing sophisticated circus requires a niche skill-set; some lines fall flat but Landa and Danielle Diniz’s choreography often deepens a story limited to the personal not the political. The enterprise is executed with panache by a charismatic cast of 10.
Who’s there? A ghost in white, twisting and turning to the song Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood, later returning to use an aerial pyramid. The show casts Old Hamlet (Arthur Morel Van Hyfte) and Hamlet (Maddox Morfit-Tighe) at a similar age, which movingly emphasises how they see themselves in each other, although the ghost’s recurrent “remember me” voiceover sounds more horror movie than tragedy.
Light circus skills relay the romance between Hamlet and Ophelia (Maleah Rendon) as acrobats deliver the love letter that leaves her literally head over heels. Ophelia and Laertes (Eduardo Grillo) tumble like scrapping siblings, although as the show progresses the circus elements are stop-start rather than continuous.
Hamlet’s letter is not read in its entirety by Polonius (Dylan Ingwersen) but scrawled across the set and then up Ophelia’s body in chalk by the prince, underlining apparent madness. Both characters’ descent is propelled by Kim Petras’s There Will Be Blood (more shades of horror) and “To be or not to be” is looped, echoing its unresolvable arguments, as cartwheels fill the stage. Hamlet’s moves are as quicksilver as his thinking.
It’s full pelt, so when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern pull up, the sense of light mischief shared by Caroline Bertorello and Kaisha Dessalines Wright respectively is all the more appreciated. In matching vests and shorts, with a script deviating from Shakespeare, they’re not so much a deceptive duo as pals with a more-than-friends frisson.
The play within the play is cod Bob Fosse but in Landa’s production the use of music and poppy, cocksure aesthetic are not unlike Baz Luhrmann’s take on Romeo and Juliet. This venue’s past life as a church is also cannily deployed when a curtain is pulled to reveal ecclesiastical architecture during Claudius’s confession.
The emotional impact often needs heightening but Ophelia’s death, in a water-filled glass box, becomes a transfixing sequence accompanied by Weyes Blood’s track Movies. Her body contorts as if twisted by the men who have wielded control of her. It leaves Gertrude’s elegy oddly redundant.
Flashy, dreamy, occasionally barmy, it’s certainly seldom boring – an eye-popping primer for students with appeal for Hamlet stans, too.
• At Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh, until 24 August
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