Hamlet Double Bill

A fresh take on Shakespeare’s Hamlet through two one-act plays: The Play’s The Thing and The Rest Is Silence. Featuring live music inspired by both 16th-century English ballads and Italian folk tunes, perfomed in English with some Italian influences, Hamlet Double Bill gives new life and dignity to the often-overlooked minor characters in the original play: the Players and the Gravediggers

Synopsis

In the first act, The Play’s The Thing, after the dubious success of The Mousetrap at the court of King Hamlet, the players are on the road again with their latest production: “The Play’s The Thing!”. These three actors, with a light-hearted and humorous tone, attempt (with delightful awkwardness) to tell the entire Hamlet story in just 25 minutes. 

The second act, The Rest is Silence, shifts to a more somber and nostalgic atmosphere. It begins at the end of Hamlet's text. It is night. The scene opens with two gravediggers who are burying in the churchyard all the characters from Hamlet. As they dig, they encounter the spirits of key figures—Claudius, Ophelia, and Hamlet himself—each seeking redemption or a chance to tell their side of the story, hoping never to be forgotten. 

Artistic Team

Direction Notes

Why “Double Bill”? Well the idea is to give voice to two different points of view of the Hamlet story: that of the Gravediggers and of the Players. Gravediggers and Players are the material executors of the fate that revolves around Elsinore: they represent the beginning and the end of Hamlet's story. They open and close the dances. If the Players are the spark that ignites in Hamlet the idea of unmasking King Claudius through the staging of what happened at the Danish court, the Gravediggers are the end of the suffering of the characters in the text, as they ascertain the end, relative and absolute, of Hamlet's vicissitudes. If the Players are the inventors of life and its possible plots, the gravediggers are the custodians of death and the end of the characters' lives. They are the last witnesses of their presence on earth: ‘Who builds stronger than a mason, a shipwright, or a carpenter?’/ ‘…a grave-maker: the houses that he makes last till doomsday. And it is precisely this unconscious importance they hold throughout the text that makes them, unbeknownst to themselves, such comic characters.

“Double Bill” also because we want to give the audience the different atmospheres present in Shakespeare's text, to which different theatrical languages also correspond. "The Rest is Silence" is darker, creepier, with the macabre and bleak atmospheres of Hamlet's text (after all, the relationship with the world of death is always present): ghostly apparitions, murders, skeletons and suicides are the main characters throughout the story. "The Play's The Thing", on the other hand, is characterised by a decidedly different slant: brilliant, comically full of stumbles and flops, of mistakes and reinterpretations of the story itself, fantastic and full of actions of play within a play.