Occasionally flawed, frequently compelling, most electrifying when it abandons its stated premise for something richer
Dada Masilo’s Hamlet, we are told, is depicted through the eyes of Ophelia. The work, an hour-long dance theatre piece marking the UK premiere of Masilo’s final creation, sets out to reframe Shakespeare’s tragedy with Ophelia at its centre, repositioning a woman usually defined by her madness and drowning as the piece’s moral and emotional anchor. It’s a bold and sympathetic premise. The execution, however, only partially delivers on it.
Ophelia does receive her moment: a solo tracing her descent that is among the evening’s highlights, raw and physically precise. But one powerful solo does not a protagonist make. Beyond it, she is largely peripheral throughout the piece much as she is in Shakespeare. The figure who truly commands this Hamlet – who forms its choreographic and emotional spine – is Gertrude. And in Llewellyn Mnguni’s hands, that turns out to be no bad thing.
Mnguni, a longstanding Masilo collaborator who also serves as Associate Choreographer, is extraordinary. She radiates power dressed in a costume of black and gold that shimmers with every shift of light, a woman of commanding presence being steadily diminished by the world around her. The production’s real heart is found in two consecutive sequences: a mourning dance performed by Gertrude’s female servants following the death of her first husband, flowing seamlessly into the celebratory ensemble piece marking her remarriage to Claudius. Grief curdles into something that is almost, but not quite, joy, and the emotional transition from loss to complicity is rendered with real clarity and intelligence.
Underpinning all of this is a score that deserves particular attention. Thuthuka Sibisi’s original music weaves classical instruments around African percussion rhythms in a way that feels genuinely integrated rather than decorative. Neither tradition swallows the other, and the result is at once propulsive and mournful, shifting registers with the choreography rather than simply accompanying it. The group work, energised by this score, has a collective rhythmic vitality that is genuinely alive, and it is here that Masilo’s synthesis of classical ballet and African dance vocabulary feels most fully realised.
Where the production stumbles is in its use of spoken text. Sections of Shakespeare’s monologues recur throughout, delivered (or rather, shouted) with an exasperated urgency that has little of an actor’s light and shade. Opening with ‘To be or not to be’ is a risk, and here it does not pay off. These passages repeatedly interrupt what the movement has so carefully built, and one is left wishing the work had trusted its dancers more fully to carry the play’s weight.
The ending, though, earns itself. The company sinks gradually to the floor as the lighting deepens to red until all that remains is the scattering of bodies and destruction. It is the final act’s bloodbath rendered in light rather than language, and it stays with you.Hamlet is not quite the Ophelia story it sets out to be. But what it becomes is arguably more interesting. It is a fierce, stylish, occasionally flawed meditation on women in the orbit of power, of whom Mnguni’s Gertrude alone is worth the journey.