Preview: Hamlet – into the Manosphere

My obsession with Shakespeare and Hamlet in particular started with a neurodivergent-friendly “deep-dive” school project in Year 7. I became so fixated that I had all but memorized the play by fourteen and it’s been with ne ever since. In the meantime, over the course of twenty years in the secondary classroom, I’ve witnessed the impacts on an entire generation of the ever-croaching  ‘unweeded garden’ of smartphones and social media. I both admire and am very fond of the much-maligned Gen Z, trapped as they are between the ‘rock’ of untrammeled new technologies, and the ‘hard place’ that is the terminal decline of Late Capitalism. I wanted to see how Shakespeare’s ideas on identity and the relationship between the public and the private would play out in our world, where “to be” means being “to be online,” and where the best vengeance Hamlet can wreak on his uncle is to troll him  to his global online following!

The primary difference is how Hamlet’s decision to ‘put an anctic disposition on’ – pretend to be mad – involves, in our version, taking on the highly eccentric, provocative and disruptive guise of an Andrew Tate-style influencer of the so-called ‘Manosphere’ – also evoking figures such as Kanye West in his online outrages of recent years. This is highly topical right now, with ‘Adolescence’ and Louis Theroux’s Netflix documentary introducing the wider public to these disturbing new sociological developments – but of course, since the deep and nuanced analysis and critique of masculinity is one of Shakespeare’s major themes, it feels like a perfect lens through which to explore Hamlet.

We use live feeds to bridge the stage-to-screen gap. Hamlet’s soliloquies are intimate, vertical “TikTok” livestreams, projecting the outpourings of his private mind onto giant screens to be consumed by a mass audience. We have also made extensive use of AI to realise aspects of the story which traditionally would left to the poetry of the dialogue and the imaginations of the audience members.

The tech is a beast, but my biggest hurdle, given my recent ADHD diagnosis, was always going to be the oranisation of such a complex show. Fortunately, I’ve benefited from such an amazing, lovely, talented, reliable and commited cast of actors and production team, that the process, counter to my apprehensions, has been a dream.

Glitchy. Existential. Hallucinatory.