Review of Dada Masilo’s Hamlet – dance remix gives this tragedy powerful tweaks | Section

Wwords, words, words. Can Hamlet maintain his tragic powers without using too many of them? A one-hour dance-theatre remix by the late South African music artist Dada Masilo it keeps the dialogue to a minimum and the opening is not very interesting, it just goes to “To be, or not to be” followed by story and character.

Later, as usual, the meeting between the prince and Ophelia, but Masilo replaces the brutality that always happens with stolen moments in the middle of the ceremony, as if they were meeting again like Romeo and Juliet at the Capulet’s ball. Matching each other’s movements, clapping hands, rolling shoulders and heaving chests, they approach each other’s tango feet. From the past, Masilos drives their art with a sense of destruction.

Allowing the two to share a romantic rivalry strengthens their romance and heightens the violence that occurs in the scene where they first appear together. Masilo adds a new scene showing Gertrude’s dismay after receiving the news of Old Hamlet’s death instead of showing her remarrying her brother. We see him searching for strength in the midst of grief, with the help of family members whose movement, stability is a message of persistence. This dance is felt in the gut.

Wooed offstage, Gertrude returns to a formal ceremony where a young family is evicted for their excesses on the dancefloor. Movement styles across generations and cultures are combined by Masilo, who has shown interest in renovating ballet’s past. His band is often energetic, driven by a relentless beat, with each show breaking like waves against Thuthuka Sibisi’s music. There’s a bit of a damp squib until Rosencrantz and Guildenstern arrive but when the pair sing The Mousetrap, their audience slowly closes in on them and they too reach their climax.

Hamlet learns of his father’s execution through a simulated painting, almost anticipating the play within the play, and they both rush and leave the scenes in a powerful movement that subtly captures his limbs. But private speech is limited by Dancing The factory design, and lines of the “hard body” screamed to the party goers.

Hamlet is portrayed by both the dancer, Tumelo Lekana, and the actor, Aphiwe Dike. Llewellyn Mnguni danced as Gertrude, Dorothy Ann Gould (RSC Gertrude in 2006) reports Ophelia’s death in voice. Ophelia herself does not speak and Masilo adds a strange sequence where she appears to have died in Gertrude’s arms, as if to avoid dying alone, before showing her drowning again. But Lehlohonolo Madise’s sublime performance as Ophelia cleverly puts the murderous and incarcerated feelings out of all the dances that have come before, making her vulnerable to the actions of others.

This Claudius (Thando Mgobhosi) seems to be guilty in the church, where the hips and curves of the party scene are replaced by a kneeling, bent prayer that gives more space, as if to ease and accept. The latter stages lose focus, but the ubiquitous sense of the choreography’s return to earth is depicted in the climax when all are affected by the disease of the kingdom, emphasized by the lighting of Suzette le Sueur (who also provides some of the beautiful costumes). It’s a group of often boring images that don’t justify the full force – a complete disaster.