Writer/performer George Rennie created Hamstrung to explore his feelings about acting, and used Hamlet‘s jester, Yorick, as inspiration. This solo show is a muse on fire, friendship, comedy, tragedy, speech, stories and death.
Barefoot and in an understated and tattered clown’s garb, Rennie bursts on to the stage in response to an audience member’s scripted call of “Who’s there?” You will recall this from the Shakespeare play, and that play does inform and suggest what we see in Hamstrung.
First, though, the performer plays with the audience, checking us out. Later, volunteers are asked up to get involved. But this is Yorick’s tale, and he’s trapped in a cycle of forgetting, rising from the earth in which he rests, and setting in motion the trajectory of the character named Hamlet.
It’s a play full of pathos, philosophy, and puns. You don’t need to know the play as Yorick’s backstory comes into play (harsh father, love for a Player, a job as comic at court). In leaving the room he reports back on the story of Elsinore, first as a jape, then events he doesn’t recognise and can’t control.
Alas, poor Yorick. In his setting of discarded stories and apples, backed by candles and flowers, he seems unfulfilled by life but drawn again and again to the power of performance and appreciation of audience.
Director Lisa Millar allows the action to ebb and flow, adding space for changes in mood. The japes of the jester, the boasts of a buffoon, the wit of a wag let us into an Elsinore where the new king is a bore and a goat is named after Norwegian challenger Fortinbras.
The space at The Glitch allows for the audience to be set in a crescent around the stage, but the lines remain blurred as Yorick seeks our approval and amusement.
Rennie is a hugely confident and imaginative performer who tugs at our hearts in a moment. Yorick, alas, is now allowed to rest and this is his reality, over and over. Which story will he tell tonight?
At just an hour Hamstrung experiments with what it means to have the need to perform, entertain and influence. We are watching the actor become the actor who …
Hamstrung leaves you wondering. It doesn’t always gel, but never wavers from challenging an audience to think. And eventually, applaud.
It closes at The Glitch tonight, but I hope we will see it staged elsewhere in the future. Follow the show Instagram for more information.
Four stars.
Image credit: Beatrice Updegraff