My news is that Hamlet from the New York Circus Project has made me totally rethink my view of circus skills in theatre.  This excellent show has some of Shakespeare’s words from the play, characters who can act, as well as state of the art acrobatics.  I have always declined reviewing shows labelled circus after an outing to the Cirque de Soleil at the Royal Albert Hall.  Yes, the performers were very skilled but apart from gasps at the physicality, I remained emotionally distant. 

But where else can you see Maddox Morfit-Tighe playing Hamlet do back flips as he refuses to answer Claudius (Stephen Elrod)’s questions about the whereabouts of Polonius (Dylan Ingwerson)’s body?  The physicality, the choreography, informs the meaning of his words.

The show opens in Elsinore’s battlements where the guards see the white clothed figure of the ghost (aerialist Arthur Morel Van Hyfte)  suspended in a purgatory prism, from which he struggles, although he cannot escape.  To return to the court where yellow suited Claudius cannot keep his hands off Gertrude (a rather prim Hilary Dennis) and where they are smooching, Hamlet shows his revulsion by vomiting. Norfit-Tighe gives us his, “Oh that this too, too solid flesh would melt . . .” soliloquy. Horatio (Guillaume Pacquin) is there and the ghost spins above in the prism and suspends from one leg.