The premiere of Hamlet at Elsie’s Bar is round the corner and cast and crew of Stagelight &Magic Inc are busy rehearsing.
The show, directed by Feroze Kamardeen and produced by Sirraj Abdul Hameed, is to be performed at the Lionel Wendt on February 20 and will go on till March 1, from 7.30pm till 9pm, with the exception of February 23 and 24 when it will not be staged.
Playing the role of a barmaid Natalie Soysa says, “I just know that I am going to have a massive case of post production blues once the show ends. We’ve all had so much fun and have bonded so well together during the constant rehearsals over the past five months.”
Natalie is a relatively experienced actress but Tarika Wickremeratne who acts as the other barmaid is a new comer to the theatre. The play is to be a full scale musical and both veterans as well as new comers have been selected for their singing as well as acting abilities.
Written by American scriptwriters Fazer Haesh and Mark Eaden, the play focuses on William Shakespeare as an up and coming writer who suddenly has an extended period of writer’s block. All his most recent works are flops and so he whiles his time away at Elsie’s bar, drinking with contemporaries Ben Johnson, John Donne and Christopher Marlowe, trying to find his muse.
The bar is owned by a dominant, cruel man called Osric who inherited it. His brother Claude who has had to play second fiddle to him all his life is the bartender. Claude loves Ophelia and though she likes him too, she considers him too poor to marry and so marries Osric instead.
They have a son called Horatio who is a handsome youth with a beautiful girlfriend called Layatee. However the two barmaids Rosie Crantz and Gilda Stern are also interested in Horatio and though being the best of friends themselves, compete for Horatio’s affections as well as stand united in turning Layatee against him.
According to Natalie who plays the role of Rosie, the relationship is basically that of Betty and Veronica competing for Archie. Though they play the role of a couple of dizzy barmaids, between them they manage to give Shakespeare the inspiration for one of his greatest lines ever — “To be or not to be, that is the question.”
Many of the main leads will be played by alternate actors each night. Thus Brandon Ingram and Nathan Imbodem will play Shakespeare, Yasas Ratnayake and Gayan De Saram will play Horatio and Saajid Reyaz and Pierre Samarasinghe will play Osric.
The cast consists of 21 talented singers cum actors. According to Rajiv Ponweera who plays the role of the constantly marginalized and festering brother Claude, it is extremely challenging to sing live with a live band while portraying emotions as an actor at the same time. He is an experienced thespian and has been singing with Marions for a while now but this is his first professional experience of having to do both.
The story is about how the frustrated Claude finally lets his resentment get the better of him and kills his brother, how Horatio deals with it and how Shakespeare uses all that is happening around him in the bar to come up with, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.
Actors in Shakespeare’s day were all males and even feminine roles were played by men. In a deliberate reversal of that situation, actress Tracy Jayasinghe will play the role of Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare’s talented contemporary. She sees no problem in playing a male character as she considers most men of that era were effeminate anyway.
The cast are all highly enthusiastic about the play and certain that it will be a roaring success. Both Brandon Ingram and Yasas Ratnayake have won the all island actors award for their portrayal of Shakespeare, yet Brandon does not take the role lightly, He has to portray Shakespeare as a person before he became a legend and he feels the pressure of portraying a character which will be used as a bench mark by future actors of the play as this is the world premiere.
The tightly woven script will take only one and a half hours to play out on stage and the audience is advised not to be late as the first few minutes are crucial to understanding the rest of the plot.
The show’s main sponsor is Dialog TV along with Firefly designing the sets, while Video Image is their video partner, and Halien Productions House, the production partner. Leo Burnett is their official agency. E FM will come in as the official electronic media sponsor, while The Daily Mirror and The Sunday Times will be the print media sponsor for the performance.
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