15 August – 13 September
It takes chutzpah to reimagine the world’s most famous play so that the setting is transformed from the royal court at Elsinore to a backyard barbecue in the American South. Or to ensure that the appearance of the ghost under a red gingham tablecloth resembles something out of Scooby Doo. To say nothing of the fact that the famous play-within-the-play scene in which Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius, reveals his guilt becomes a game of charades staged to accuse a murderer. Even more daring is the discovery that the ending of a tragedy, far from being preordained, can metamorphose into a glitter-ball disco.
This and more is what writer James Ijames has achieved in Fat Ham, the most radical reworking of Shakespeare’s original since Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz And Guidenstern Are Dead burst onto the scene in the mid 1960s. The Pulitzer-prize winning Fat Ham, now with a Black British cast and arriving at the Swan in Stratford for its European premiere, offers a raucous, buoyant and ultimately hopeful evening. None of those are adjectives you’d usually associate with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, yet Ijames stays (mostly) true to the spirit of a piece which he plainly loves and knows backwards.
Juicy (aka Hamlet), a sullen but sympathetic Olisa Odele, is mourning the death of his father Pap, stabbed in a prison fight. Pap was a mean, aggressive man, jailed for murder, yet Juicy can just about bring himself to say ‘I miss him’. Not so Juicy’s mum, Tedra, exuberantly played by Andi Osho. She is celebrating her very rapid marriage to Rev, brother to her late husband. Rev may be a preacher and a dab hand at a barbecue but he also organised the prison-stabbing of Pap. Sule Rimi, doubling as ghost and step-father, brings energy and swagger to both parts.
Other characters echo their originals in Hamlet with Jasmine Elcock giving a decisive performance as Opal (Ophelia) and Corey Montague-Sholay as her brother Larry, a young man who spends most of the action as a rigid, straight-backed marine before coming out loud and proud. For this is a play that lays as much, if not more, stress on gender and sexuality as it does on race. The young characters feel themselves forced into roles that they don’t fit. Juicy does not wish to be an avenger or to follow the masculine creed of his father and uncle. Opal, also queer, has ambitions to run a shooting range. Tio – or Horatio – gives a speech in praise of pleasure, about imagining the world differently. ‘Soft’ is key word, with the older generation decrying it and the younger ones seeing something attractive and tactile in the term. Fat Ham, then, flies the flag for difference but not in a preachy or po-faced style.
Aficionados of Hamlet will find plenty to enjoy in this production, under the fluid direction of Sideeq Heard. There is a wonderfully effective moment when, just before the charades, Juicy suddenly breaks out into Shakespeare’s ‘I have heard/That guilty creatures sitting at a play…’ Elsewhere there are scattered Elizabethan lines and phrases, set among the slang and demotic of the Black South, rather as Stoppard mingled two style of speech, high and low, in Rosencrantz And Guidenstern. Blink and you’ll miss a very neat joke centred on ‘And there’s the rub.’ And who knew that the lyrics to Radiohead’s Creep as performed in the karaoke session would so perfectly describe Juicy’s – and Hamlet’s – predicament?
★★★★☆ Philip Gooden 23 August 2025
Photography credit: Ali Wright
