7pm •  Judith E Wilson Drama Studio • Faculty of English • 9 West Road •  Cambridge •  CB3 9DP

iHamlet is an immersive digital reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

It is a CGI flesh rodeo.  It is one thousand reeking i-Pods, rotting in the evacuated skull of a visionary tech billionaire. It is Idiots strutting towards their own built-in obsolescence, accompanied by the sound of a Canadian psychology professor falling down a flight of marble stairs, pitch-shifted into a near-perfect rendition of the Seinfeld theme tune. At the end you can hear him moaning for his mother, pitch-shifted into the sound of a laughter track. It is a bird, bleached white and buffering at the edge of a hope. But mostly it is the story of Hamlet and Ophelia.

Hamlet: The Supreme Gentleman; the ur-incel; the bull and the bull rider. Ophelia: The One the River Didn’t Keep; the accused woman and the woman who accuses; the loverdaughtermother with ONE HOLE TOO MANY.  It is the story of all of us: all of the HamletActors and all of the OpheliaActors. All of the Idiots.

Congealing several groundbreaking performance texts into something altogether new, iHamlet will be performed in the Theatre of Cruelty (the Judith E. Wilson Studio). The show will involve both live  performance and audio-visual elements, including an original soundtrack by LORE. It will be either a gorgeous, nauseating spectacle that will make you want to crawl back inside your mother’s womb, or an abject failure. In either case it should be worth the price of admission.

FLESH LIKES TO KEEP THE COMPANY OF FLESH, so don’t retreat into your entrails:       

iHamlet is here to stimulate.

Content Warnings: discussion of violence, rape, suicide, strobe lights and loud noise.