ON-CUE articles

Frailty; Thy name is anyone who has ever sat through two and half hours of Hamlet
by Paul Daly

I have a second-hand copy of Hamlet. So far, I have discovered the skeletons of three previous owners. I think my own sense of humour is in there as well, just after a particularly nasty soliloquy in scene three. So, with this backdrop, and a total lack of modern cinematic and theatrical techniques (such as nudity, cannibalism and spatulas), you would think that for your average teenager two and a half hour performance of Hamlet would be boring. You would be wrong. It's actually incredibly boring.

It was Valentines Day. Led by our Svengali-like guru, Mr. Bruton, our English class decided to make a day of it. Many members of the class, indeed, experienced female contact for the first time. I knew, before entering the Everyman Theatre (motto: All contributions are voluntary, we just don't let you out without making them) that it was going to be bad. I briefly considered throwing myself under a bus, but the driver would probably have managed to miss me. There was nothing to do but go in.

So we went in. Needless to say, it was very boring. The first scene is a bit of a blur. I put that down to the shock of seeing the cast. All of the men were wearing tights, even Hamlet, the principal character. I wouldn't have minded, but he had terrible legs. Not many men wear tights nowadays. If, for instance, you wore tights in a public place, you would be lucky to leave the area with all key organs, never mind testes, intact.

It was just as well that the actors were wearing tights, thus distracting the audience from their acting inability. The vast majority of them were outperformed by the guy two rows in front of me who kept making farting noises with his armpits. Indeed, some of the cast members were so poor that the only acting qualification they had was that they could speak without biting their own tongues in the process. And Stephen Hawking was still overlooked. I couldn't hear them talk, either, though this may have had more to do with the fact that I was so bored that I started wiggling my fingers around in my ears, digging out lumps of earwax and flicking them at people.

By the interval, my brain had gone numb. I am still suffering from pins and needles in my frontal lobe, which might explain why I have just fed my little brother to the dog. I wasn't the only one bored rigid. When the majority of the audience began applauding as the curtain fell, I'm sure that my silent pleas of "Don't clap, you'll only encourage them," were not the only ones.

Despite the relatively early hour, I overheard a number of teachers in the bar at the interval. "I'll have an Irish coffee. Easy on the actual coffee." I must stress that I was not actually in the bar at the time, as they wouldn't let me in with my six-pack and bag of peanuts. Only joking. I only managed to get some caffeine into me, with the help of a syringe, during the break. Luckily, Act II was a little more exciting.

Things got lively very early in the second Act, which was fortunate, because I had been unable to locate the toilet during the break and was holding on for dear life. "I need a fag," muttered someone next to me. His timing was unfortunate, as at that point, Rosencratz and Guildenstern, two insurance salesmen, had just walked onto the stage. They looked like they had come straight from a Gay Pride March.

Then there was Ophelia (suggested pronunciation: Oh-Feel-Yeah!), Hamlet's bit on the side. Sadly, there was no nudity, as the play was written in an era in which people had to survive, wait for it, without Sony Playstations or sandwich makers. Naturally, in such a backwards society, there could have been no nudity. Shakespeare (the guy who wrote Hamlet) didn't have nudity available and compensated by using other techniques, such as having the same character rambling on and on and on and on for so long that I attempted to make a break for it, before Hamlet nailed me with a well-aimed rhyming couplet. Somewhere in the middle of his "To be or not to be" speech, I lost the will to live, only regaining it later on when Hamlet kicked Ophelia up the backside.

Soon after that, the play ended, as Hamlet had stabbed the majority of the cast, probably due to boredom. He also stabbed the guy making the farting noises, but it was too late. I had already strangled him.

By the time I got outside, I was reasonably depressed, but not totally. For example, when I saw a bus pass, I didn't throw myself under it. I threw a passerby under it. It might have been the pins and needles kicking in, but personally, I think it was his own fault for wearing tights.

Š2001, Paul Daly

Reproduced with the permission of the author.

Paul Daly is a blisteringly young (17) writer from sunny Cork, in even sunnier Ireland, where humor is spelt humour. He was born sometime during the night in 1983 and has been largely ignored since then.
His article first appeared in the on-line magazine - www.thenetwits.com
His own website is - www.geocities.com/p_m_daly