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Culture Literature

Shakespeare’s “Claudius” is Innocent

CW: Major spoilers for Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” and Pierre Bayard’s essay “Enquête sur Hamlet: le Dialogue de Sourds” In Enquête sur Hamlet, an essay still unpublished in English, Pierre Bayard highlights a plothole. In the famous Mousetrap scene, Hamlet stages a play depicting a murder by poisoned ear to expose Claudius’s crime.  However, in a pre-Mousetrap […]

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Comedy Fringe Theatre

Fringe 2022: Hamlet: The Play The Panto The Musical

A rip-roaring reinterpretation of one of Shakespeare’s best-known plays, Hamlet: The Play The Panto The Musical, is a riotous romp through an age-old story. Wonderfully wacky, and full of charm, this genre-bending musical-mashup is Shakespeare how it should be – dark, witty, and very, very, camp. Written and directed by Hannah McGregor, and with a […]

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Fringe Theatre

‘Empowering’: Ophelia is also Dead review

The curtains part and a young woman enters the stage. She immediately breaks the fourth wall as she realises the audience is in the room with her. Thanks to her tear-stained make-up and dirty wedding dress, she looks tragically beautiful.  The show is a tragically moving story of Ophelia’s madness and why her spiral begins, […]

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Fringe Theatre

DUCT’s Hamlet review

Packing Shakespeare’s longest play into an hour is an unenviable task. Despite the strong acting performances, what the chief abridgers at Durham University Classical Theatre have ultimately done is ensure a lot of the magic of Hamlet is lost.  Integral scenes such as that at the graveyard – where Hamlet toys with the theme of […]

Categories
albums Live Music

Aberdeen jazz quintet Hamlet impress with their debut, Act One

Hamlet are a relatively young band, formed in the spring of 2017. They started off life by playing contemporary works and jazz standards but have now moved on to create their own original album, Act One. It is a debut album that is daring and experimental, not afraid to mix in a variety of styles, […]

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Comedy Fringe Theatre

Shit-Faced Shakespeare: Hamlet

Shit-Faced Shakespeare is the epitome of what a Fringe show should be: rowdy, risqué, and reckless. Not a novice at the Fringe, the troupe of five actors performing one of Shakespeare’s great works is returning for yet another year. This time, they have chosen to recreate Hamlet…with just one small twist. Each night, one of […]