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Last night we went to go see The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, which I am going to attempt to write up very hastily because tonight is the LAST night it's in Boston and it was great so if anyone is inspired to make a last-minute booking they have the chance.

This is an all-dance essentially ballet production; no idea how it would have read or how comprehensible it would be if one was not familiar with The Story of Hamlet but as someone who does know the Story of Hamlet, it does a really beautiful job at being a Hamlet -- one of the friends I was with said afterwards 'I could hear the soliloquies in my head when Hamlet was doing solos' and I definitely also experienced that effect.

The cast was pared down to Hamlet, Horatio, Ophelia, Polonius, Laertes, Gertrude, Claudius, and R&G, and each of them had their own specific dance style that evoked their character. R&G in particular I thought were really striking, a sort of matched slithery jester style that involved a very different kind of physicality from Horatio or Laertes, and Horatio's style was sort of similar to theirs but a much more classical ballet jester with cartwheels and so on -- there was one part where they were dancing a pas de trois where they were all essentially dancing the same, and then Claudius shooed Horatio away and R&G immediately got slitherier. Horatio and Hamlet also did the play-within-a-play as a pas de deux, backs facing the audience with horrible comic mask-faces for the king and queen in the play on the backs of their heads, and it was so funny and creepy and fantastically disorienting.

Ophelia was fantastic, the Ophelia-Laertes-Polonius relationship was very intense -- Polonius was a sort of classical ballet wizard with a big staff that he used in all his dancing, which I thought was very funny but also very effective -- and Ophelia's madness was a really beautiful and awful sequence with mirrors and all of the cast emerging out of them, first just hands grabbing for her and then everyone surrounding her and pulling her in different directions. (The show was Not leaning away from incest vibes in all directions either, Hamlet planted one on Gertrude's lips at the end of Polonius' death scene; afterwards another friend was like 'maybe I am forgetting the plot of Hamlet but who was the woman in the room when he killed Polonius? Isn't that normally his mom??' WELL.)

The ballet also added a couple of dance bits to evoke scenes that are not actually in Shakespeare's script and thus heighten relationships; there's one that I loved when Laertes goes away to France that's Laertes going in one direction with his little rucksack and Hamlet and Horatio coming the other way after having just seen the ghost, and they pass each other agonizingly slowly and then have a fraught farewell handshake, and then during the dancing with Ophelia's corpse scene (POOR OPHELIA, they are straight-up hauling that actress around and fighting over her limp body while Horatio chases after Hamlet like 'PLEASE CHILL OUT, PLEASE BE NORMAL') there's a part where Hamlet and Laertes just kind of fall into each other's arms for a moment and cling and start to grieve together and then Claudius runs up and hauls them away from each other and they start fighting again. Gertrude also gets a beautiful little solo bit to change into mourning clothes for Ophelia's funeral where she dances in a fraught way with Hamlet's sword and is doing the sort of rocking-a-baby ballet motion, which despite having no words is a really nice bit of Gertrude interiority that you don't usually get.

Let's see, what else ... oh, the ghosts! The ghosts are all done with big tricks of shadow and light and are extremely, extremely cool. Also Horatio steals the tablecloth to pretend to be a ghost during the big breakfast scene to try and explain to Hamlet what's going on and it's very cute. I think the thing that worked least was the big finale, which looked extremely cool (Laertes and Hamlet both had big long streamers attached to their swords and they fought with them) but did make it very difficult to track who was poisoned at any given time. But overall strong recommend for Hamlet enjoyers and very curious to hear what anyone who was not previously a Hamlet enjoyer made of it if they happened to see it.

It's been a week of gifts and delights for me! First, sophia_sol bound my story "Suradanna and the Sea" -- published online in The Fantasist in 2016, but never available in a print version -- into a couple of really beautiful physical books as their first bookbinding project, and sent me one of the copies, which arrived yesterday.

Up until The Iron Children, "Suradanna" was the longest thing I'd ever written/published and I think perhaps the best, and I am so unbelievably delighted that it will now get to live in my house and not just on my computer, and that sophia_sol chose it of all the things that live on the computer to bind. I have just been Gazing at it all morning and will probably spend the rest of my Sunday doing so at intermittent intervals.

And, speaking of things that live on the computer: it's Festivids time and despite being a criminal who never actually posted my Festivids letter I have received not one but not two vids as gifts:

1. An Eye for An Eye -- this is a Romeo + Juliet (1996) vid that's using all of Luhrmann's symbolism to make a really interesting and thoughtful argument about the meta-arc and cosmology of the play; it's an extremely cool work of vid-as-essay and is definitely going to be living in my head whenever I watch the movie again

2. Boys Keep Swinging -- all I can say about this frankly is that my cross-production Twelfth Night fanvid last year walked so that this vid could RUN, I am just rolling gleefully around like Scrooge McDuck in my pile of Rosalinds, PLEASE go check it out, it's everything that I always want As You Like It to be!

AND, speaking of Shakespeare -- this last one is not a gift for me in particular except for all the ways that it is, but I have been having the world's best time with Emails from an Actor, a real-time readalong of various books published from Within The Experience Of Participating In the 1964 John Gielgud-Richard Burton production of Hamlet.

The two books in question are Letters from an Actor by William Redfield, a moderately famous actor who played Guildenstern in the show, and John Gielgud Directs Richard Burton In Hamlet: A Journal of Rehearsals, by Richard L. Sterne, who had more or less just graduated acting school at the time and was playing A Gentleman.

The joy of Redfield is that he has five million opinions about everything, especially his colleagues. He will drop into monologue at the drop of a hat and it WILL contain some of the wildest sentences that you have ever seen in your life. We are only one week into the project and I have already forced people to experience a number of Redfield quotes against their will, ( which I will give you a sampling of here )

The joy of Sterne is that, while his prose is very restrained and documentarian compared to Redfields, he SECRETLY SMUGGLED A TAPE RECORDER DISGUISED AS A BRIEFCASE with him into every rehearsal so he's putting down direct quotes. Many of these are just genuinely interesting thoughts and conversations about Hamlet staging but also sometimes they're completely different from the 'Gielgud said' as reported by Redfield, which is just a great time every time for me personally.

I know many of us at this juncture are burned out on email newsletter fiction but if you have any interest in Hamlet, in the actual process of putting together a theatrical production, or in wild and funny opinions held by B-tier theatrical actors in the 1960s, I cannot more highly recommend this experience.