Journalist Colin Murphy writes for Culture on RTÉ about his new work Hamlet, Prince of Derry, which was aired on the Drama On One slot on RTÉ Radio 1 on Sunday. Listen back here
Surveillance is one of the great themes of our age. There is CCTV everywhere. Alexa and Siri are always listening. Google knows where we're going, and what time we'll get there. "Surveillance capitalism", Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff calls it: the wiring of surveillance deep into the economics of our technology-rich society.
What better play to tease out how this works and what it means than Hamlet? It is a play in which everybody seems to be spying on everybody else - Polonius on Laertes; Claudius and Polonius on Ophelia and Hamlet; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on Hamlet; and, over it all, the ghost surveilling Hamlet's every action (and inaction).
So when the Derry theatre company Stage Beyond asked me to write something for them, it was Hamlet that I turned to. And not merely is Hamlet rich in allusion to surveillance, it maps well to the technology of our times.
Hamlet himself is a notorious narcissist who likes nothing better than to indulge in meandering, confessional meditations. Our age has a term for such a person: we call them YouTubers.
For many people today - including my kids - it is YouTubers who are "the abstract and brief chronicles of the time", as Hamlet says of the touring players who arrive at the castle to put on a play. So I took inspiration from YouTubers such as Irishman Jack Septic Eye (styled Jacksepticeye) - whose channel has had over 12 billion views.
The Players thus become the Gamers; and the play within the play, in which Hamlet gets the Players to act out a scene dramatising the murder of his father, becomes the game within the play, in which the Gamers recreate the murder in something like Minecraft (we called our game Mad in Craft).
Then, for the final duel between Hamlet and Laertes, I conceived of a digital equivalent: a kind of Hunger Games where the rivals would fight each other in a close-combat game, and suffer electric shocks when losing a game "life". Inspired by Mortal Kombat, I called the game Mortal Coil.
Uncut, Hamlet is over four hours long. My brief for Stage Beyond, who are a company of adults with learning difficulties, was to give them a play no longer than one hour. It may seem irreverent to take a scalpel (or a scythe) to Shakespeare, but then everyone does: it is rarely staged uncut. As a journalist, I'm used to being ruthless with text, but could I fit the plot of Hamlet into 45 minutes?
I had to make sacrifices: the Fortinbras invasion subplot was gone. Polonius was cut; instead, Horatio became a Svengali-like adviser, whispering in the ears of both Hamlet and Claudius (and became Horatia, played by Catherine Campbell). Where the text was unclear or obsolete or insufficiently economic for our needs, I rewrote.
And then, a couple of months into rehearsals, the pandemic descended ("hell itself breathes out contagion to this world," as Shakespeare writes), and the stage production was aborted. But RTÉ's Drama on One stepped into the breach and suddenly we found ourselves wrestling with a whole new layer of technology. The actors found themselves performing down a phone line to Montrose, and I had to rethink the visual use of technology in the play for the audio medium.
Has it worked? The listener will have to judge for themselves. Shakespeare gave us a riveting play of extraordinary insight and language; the actors of Stage Beyond have responded to that with verve and integrity. It's been a thrill to have such collaborators. All I can hope for is to have served them well and that, together, we can bring some mirth to a world that is slowly emerging from under a "foul and pestilent congregation of vapours".
Hamlet, Prince of Derry by Colin Murphy after William Shakespeare, is directed by Conall Morrison, with an original score by Si Schroeder, and produced by Kevin Brew. The play is performed by Stage Beyond Theatre Company with Patrick O'Kane and UTV Presenter Paul Clark.
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