Hamlet Camp, Opening Night at Carriageworks - Group Therapy for the Western Canon.

There are few characters in the Western canon that cling to actors quite like Hamlet. Not Lear, not Macbeth, not even Richard III. Hamlet lingers. He seeps. He follows performers home, into subsequent roles, into storage units, second-hand bookshops, and the long corridors of self-questioning that define a life on stage. Hamlet Camp, returning to Carriageworks after a sold-out world premiere, understands this pathology intimately - and turns it into a theatrical intervention.

Opening night at Carriageworks felt appropriately ritualistic. Bay 20, with its industrial bones and cavernous intimacy, is a space that resists illusion and encourages exposure. It is an ideal setting for a production that is fundamentally about stripping actors bare - not psychologically in the method sense, but professionally, existentially, and affectionately. This is not Shakespeare performed; it is Shakespeare metabolised.

Three actors. One Danish prince. Zero chance of recovery.

Written and performed by Brendan Cowell, Ewen Leslie and Toby Schmitz - all accomplished stage and screen actors, all veterans of the Australian theatre ecosystem - Hamlet Camp is framed as a rehabilitation facility for former Hamlets. The conceit is simple and devastatingly effective. Hamlet, often described as the Everest of male acting roles, becomes an addiction. Once you have played him, the argument goes, you are never quite free. The character rewires how you think, speak, doubt and desire meaning.

Before the conceit fully kicks in, the production opens with three autobiographical poems. This is a canny structural decision. Rather than plunging immediately into satire, the work establishes its emotional stakes. These monologues are not indulgent detours but thematic primers - meditations on labour, identity, precarity and memory.

Schmitz’s Skip Retail Therapy unfolds in the aisles of an inner-west second-hand bookshop, a familiar holding pattern for actors between auditions. His references to Sydney’s cultural geography are precise without being parochial, situating the actor as both custodian and commodity within literary culture. Leslie’s Ship to Shore traces the particular strangeness of early success - the dissonance of being recognised before one understands oneself, and the quiet grief of what is displaced when childhood becomes a career. Cowell’s Storage is perhaps the most emblematic of the evening, transforming the storage unit into a secular shrine - a place where objects outlast roles, and where a nomadic life briefly congeals into something resembling permanence.

Only once these men are established as corporeal, working artists does Hamlet Camp reveal itself fully. The actors re-emerge in blue scrubs, fitted with electronic implants that deliver electric shocks whenever they relapse - that is, whenever they quote Hamlet, mention characters, or drift into Shakespearean cadence. This is aversion therapy for the classically trained.

The humour is broad, sharp and knowingly insider. Directors are skewered for their excesses - the tyranny of “concept”, the fetishisation of emptiness, the insistence that an actor can simply “find it in the body”. Recent trends in Australian and international theatre are lightly but unmistakably referenced: hyper-mediated productions heavy on screens and cameras, genre-bending Hamlets with sneakers and microphones, minimalist stagings that mistake austerity for insight. Critics are dispatched with affectionate brutality. Stage managers, heroes of the form, receive their own knowing nods.

Yet what gives Hamlet Camp its depth is that the satire never curdles into bitterness. This is not grievance theatre. It is reflective, generous, and often unexpectedly tender. The actors are laughing at themselves as much as at the industry. Their shared history - as colleagues, rivals, witnesses to one another’s careers - gives the dialogue a muscular intimacy.

Interruptions overlap, arguments spiral, rhythms collide. At times the piece resembles a Beckett play rewritten by Monty Python, filtered through the rhythms of Australian vernacular.

Claudia Haines-Cappeau’s presence is crucial. Her Ophelia dance sequence, placed early in the work, functions less as narrative than as haunting. It reminds us that Hamlet’s obsession is not solitary - that the play’s emotional debris has historically been carried by others, often women, whose stories have been aestheticised or sidelined. Her later appearance as a newly admitted Hamlet patient - explicitly gendered and self-aware - gently punctures the masculine mythology surrounding the role.

Steve Francis’s sound design underpins the production with restraint, allowing silence and rhythm to do much of the work.

Blazey Best’s disembodied voice as the camp’s supervisor is impeccably judged. Detached, authoritative, faintly sinister, she embodies the institutional logic of “care” that often governs artistic labour - benevolent on the surface, coercive beneath.

If Hamlet Camp occasionally invites questions of its own - why the autobiographical frame is so distinct from the camp narrative, why a potential fourth Hamlet is introduced so late - these moments feel less like flaws than like productive tensions. After all, Hamlet himself is a play that resists resolution, addicted to digression and delay.

What ultimately distinguishes Hamlet Camp is its refusal to mythologise suffering. Theatre is shown not as noble torment but as complex work - precarious, absurd, sustaining, bruising. The production speaks to anyone who has chased a role, a title, a moment of recognition, only to discover that fulfilment is provisional. Hamlet becomes a metaphor not just for acting, but for ambition itself.

This is an actor’s play in the best sense - fast, physically demanding, intellectually agile, and emotionally exposed. It culminates in a tightly choreographed frenzy that feels earned rather than ornamental, a release after sustained pressure. The audience, seated close enough to register breath and sweat, is implicated rather than merely entertained.

Hamlet Camp does not ask whether Hamlet is the greatest role in theatre. It assumes that mythology, then dismantles it with affection and wit. In doing so, it offers something rarer than satire - a clear-eyed meditation on what it means to build a life around words that were written four centuries ago and still refuse to let us go.

Tickets are scarce, the run is short, and the afterlife of the production feels inevitable. In the meantime, this is theatre that trusts its audience - to catch the references, to feel the undercurrents, and to laugh at the strange comfort of being haunted.

To be free, or not to be - turns out that was never really the question.

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Words by AW.

PHoto courtesy of Daniel Boud.