This tight-knit domestic drama unfolds through an abridged version of Hamlet. In Hotel Elsinore, a mother and two young adult children have arrived to attend a festival in Elsinore in place of their late father, “A Great Actor”.
Written, created, and performed by Susanna Hamnett, Joshua MacGregor, and Lily MacGregor, Hotel Elsinore offers a play within a play highlighting this family’s deep-routed trauma.
A storm rages outside. There are two beds and a chair inside, a phone,and suggestions of other hotel furnishings. The son, Henry, like his father, rises to the challenge of adapting Shakespeare by directing a version his father would hate.
The daughter, Olivia, reveals the family watched old Henry’s solo Hamlet so many times the lines run through their bodies like rock, and young Henry agrees that father’s version was ‘boring’.
Through carefully chosen scenes from the play, these three people explore the dynamic of an overbearing father and husband (the mother, Greta, laments how she never ‘got to play Gertrude’).
Just as Hamlet carries his grief upon him, so do old Henry’s family, pushed by a condition in his will to perform their own version of the play. So, in Hotel Elsinore, we watch their rehearsal play out at 2am.
It’s not that ‘the plays the thing’, although the abridged Hamlet is easy enough to follow, but the family dynamics and the gap left by the routine of old Henry’s touring and solo show.
In this sparse set, old Henry’s family explore the things they can’t say to each other through the verse. Both children clearly struggle with a mother who carries sample size alcohol bottles for quick fixes and reveres the man who crushed her own acting ambitions.
Hotel Elsinore is an interesting piece created by a real-life family who can read and balance each other while offering performances of grace and clarity.
Good for Shakespeare lovers, connisseurs of dramatic conflict, and those who enjoy committed, small-scale theatre.
4 stars.
Hotel Elsinore is at Riverside Studios until 5 July with details here.