OPHELIA by Cake Theatrical Productions

“Shakespeare on steroids”

Reviewer: Walter Chan
Performance: 17 March 2016

You’ve never seen Shakespeare done this way before

Jo Kukathas in Ophelia. Photo: Cake Theatricals.

In short, Ophelia is mad.

More specifically, it is a play about madness as Shakespeare’s tragic maiden, Ophelia, is plucked from the pages of Hamlet, and cast in a different light. (I mean this quite literally as well with the harsh working lights being switched on as the show begins.)

Viewers familiar with Hamlet will appreciate the added emotional complexity in this version, as well as the sly allusions to the original—the line, “mic check, 1, 2… 2… to be or not to be” earns a hearty chuckle from the audience. However, if you aren’t familiar with Hamlet – and that’s okay too – the show doesn’t beat you over the head for it (but I just might… come on, it’s the classic Shakespeare text!).

“Ophelia is madness.”

That is the basic summary of Hamlet’s Ophelia, which Cake Theatricals takes as its premise. The catch-22 that outlines Ophelia’s situation is given a feminist treatment in the play: How can she convince us that she is not insane? Through forceful articulation? Through skittish histrionics? Through silence? Through death?

Director Natalie Hennedige carefully peels away at the layers of Shakespeare’s Ophelia, and then puts her back together again by rearranging the pieces in a different order. Disjointed fragments of the script blur the line between the play and the plays-within-the-play, in typical Cake fashion, and its acerbic and irreverent edge is not lost. There is a mop masquerading as Hamlet’s father’s ghost. An actor, brandishing a knife, leaps right into the audience. And, among others, a bra on a naked male torso. A Nerf gun. A bassoon solo.

Sounds like madness to you?

Notwithstanding the eclectic mix of theatrical elements, I do feel there is a method to the madness. This makes it all the more maddening because this play shows immense potential in casting off the shackles of Shakespeare’s text, while still maintaining its bitter fatalism. The latter half of the show, which focuses more on the actor/auteur dynamic than the relationship between Ophelia and Hamlet, seems clunky and repetitive as the parody quickly degenerates into farce.

A quick note here: this piece was actually a shorter work called “Instructions for Swimming; Notes on Drowning”, shown at Cake’s 10th anniversary celebration last November. It’s a pity that what you see now is twice the length, but half the fun.

“The whole world is your five stages of grief”, Ophelia muses at one point in the play. Yet, even as she angrily struts and frets her hour(s) upon the stage, it is at her most subdued that Ophelia is most stirring. Ophelia/Ophelia: woman and word coalesce until they are indistinguishable from each other as the show invokes her corporeality that is ineffable, ineluctable, and incandescent.

Truly, Ophelia is mad.