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A view from the cheap seat

Sandwiched between the cushions of a Turl Street Kitchen sofa, I found these notes of a bygone student producer: “Tuesday, 4th Week, Michaelmas.”

So we’re only just about to go do it! We are going to put on Hamlet. Yeah, we are going to do Hamlet at OXFORD.

We tossed around a few ideas today, me, Mark, Jez and Sophie (wait, what, they literally have the same names as the char- acters from the first series of Peep Show). We thought this has got to be different. People do Shakespeare all the time, sometimes, you actually can’t move in your JCR because your Urban Outfitter’s cardigan is stuck to one of the five pins holding up one of the countless over-stylised, bloody neon, post- ers for King Lear – which was rather good by the way! (I definitely didn’t get round to seeing it). We bashed out some ideas: we thought Hamlet as a woman, Hamlet as a post-grad, Hamlet as a tutor, Hamlet without the character of Hamlet. We thought ship in Benedict Cumberbatch and ramp up the media presence with another tire- some photobomb (not that that production needs anymore publicity), we thought do it all completely naked – we could do the sword bit at the end with their penises – feminist critics (actually any critics) would have an absolute field day. And then I really ‘hit the nail on the head’ as they say. We do Hamlet… where Hamlet is, actually, a dog.

We’re now going with, ‘Hamlet without the character of Hamlet’. We feel that, basically, everyone here has seen Hamlet already, or at least read it, and they really know the character of Hamlet better than we, at Hypnotast Productions (little nod to our rivals there), could ever perform it in the one and a half hour slot that we are bid- ding for at the BT. It will also fantastically cut down both run and rehearsal time, and hopefully we won’t need the gross skull.” 

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