Performance
Alas! Poor Yorick.
Tuesday 22 October, 7.30pm
Malthouse Theatre
If the Two Ronnies were cast as the Gravediggers in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, re-written by Samuel Beckett you might have something like Ridiculusmus’s Alas! Poor Yorick. Mixing the mundane with the magical; moments of banal idiocy are interspersed with ones of cinematic elegance as Jon Haynes and David Woods pull out every trick in their theatrical playbook to create a fresh take on Shakespeare’s much-loved clowns, re-enacting all the preceding acts of the original and meticulously staging the famous graveyard scene in all its 420-year-old glory.
Flipping the original Shakespearean tragedy into an existential clown piece, Ridiculusmus cast aside chaos and mistaken murders to unearth a beautiful and oddly moving meditation on work, faith and existence, with the prevaricating protagonist offered in a refreshingly contemporary light.