Review: Collide Theatre's Hamletmachine

Never have I ever seen a performance in an abandoned warehouse. Never, that is, until two weeks ago, when I went over to Ugly Duck on Tanner Street to watch a performance of Heiner Müller's Hamletmachine. The German postmodernist play was produced and directed by a small, up-and-coming theatre company called Collide Theatre, and it's this small, up-and-coming theatre company that introduced me to a completely new way of experiencing theatre.

Perhaps the best way to explain Hamletmachine is that it's weird. Really weird, as you'd expect a postmodernist drama to be. I was initially attracted to the event because it had 'Hamlet' in the title, and Hamlet is my favourite Shakespeare work. Hamletmachine, it turns out, is loosely based on Hamlet, and it does help to have read or watched Hamlet being performed to get a sense of the literary context of the play. But Collide's Hamletmachine is more challenging than Shakespeare's early modern writing. For one thing, it's performed around a warehouse, which means that the audience follows the actors from scene to scene. We are literally following the story; we are almost part of the play. The actors don't quite interact, but neither is the audience wholly invisible. We're shielded by a kind of translucent veil, and our place in the play is deliberately uncertain.

Reading back the script today, it's even clearer how well Emily Louizou, as director, and her creative team have done to adapt such a complex and difficult play for an everyday London audience. As I read the script, I have flashbacks to particular scenes from the warehouse. The first scene, in which we watched a bride glide in slow motion down a path of soil towards her groom, followed by a group carrying an empty coffin, was executed with such precision and skill that it sent shivers down my spine – and I'm not one to use those kind of cliches very often. I'm also reminded of Ophelia in the second part of the play. Actress Ava Pickett is transfixing as she recites Müller's most beautiful passage, “I am Ophelia”. I loved Susan Hoffman and Maximilian Davey's mimed duet at the piano, and Hamlet's declaration, "I want to be a woman", led to a eerily beautiful scene in which the actors pair off and dance, slow at first and then with increasing mania, while the audience looks on as spectators.

For something so complex, and with such a challenging space, Collide has done really well for itself. It's proved that, contrary to conventional theatre groups, it can work in the most difficult of artistic circumstances that leaves the audience feeling curious rather than confused. Their commitment to a different kind of theatre is admirable, as producer Rachel Horowitz tells me that while they're looking to perform the play at other venues, perhaps in Brighton or Edinburgh, “we're not just going to go to a black box theatre and do it. If we find the space and like the space and think the space can tell the story, then we will go for it.” Louizou tells me to watch this space – and I definitely will.