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Fat Ham (Swan Theatre, Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford-Upon-Avon) - ★★★★★ REVIEW
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I do suspect that Shakespeare might be rolling in his grave at the prospect of Fat Ham, but only in order to find a better angle at which to twerk.
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Oh gosh.
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Up there with the dumbest things I've ever said. Oh my God. Hey, welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel. Or hello to you if you are listening on podcast platforms. And for those of you who are listening on podcast platforms, I feel compelled to let you know I'm wearing a T shirt from the Royal Shakespeare Company with a bedazzled sequined skull on it. It's sort of iridescent and that felt like a journey. It would have been wrong not to take you on today. This is official merchandise being sold while Fat Ham is playing at the RSC and I believe reason enough to make the trip. Anyway, if you're just meeting me now under these chaotic circumstances, my name is Mickey Jo. I am obsessed with all things theatre and I am a professional theatre critic here on social media. I briefly forgot the word theatre critic. Then that's a great start to this review. I am today going to be telling you all about the Pulitzer Prize winning play Fat Ham, which I first saw two years ago on Broadway. My first ever trip to New York March 2023 at what was then the American Airlines Theatre. It is now the Todd Haymes owned and operated by the Roundabout Theatre Company. The play is now making its UK and European premiere at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford Upon Avon, which is an ingenious piece of program that I get so excited just thinking about. I think it is so cool that it is here and to zoom out for a moment. I've been telling you about quite a few plays recently at the rsc, having gone several years not visiting the rsc, and I think that has to be attributed to the dynamic and exciting and varied programming that has been put together by the venue's new co artistic directors, Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey snaps for them, and Fatham is no exception to that. In fact, when the season was announced, this was the show I was most excited about because this is a take on Shakespeare's Hamlet, but through through a contemporary black American lens, making it one of three Hamlet adjacent plays programmed this year at the rsc, but also such a brilliant piece of theatre for them to bring to audiences who know and love Shakespeare, giving the play an audience reaction which is sizably different to the one that it had in New York, which I'll expand on a little bit in today's full review. I'm going to let you know exactly what this play is like, what it's about, in order to try and give you a sense of whether or not you might enjoy it and might want to take the trip to the RSC to go and see it for yourself. Of course, if you already have if you have seen Fat Ham at the Royal Shakespeare Company and Stratford Upon Avon, please let us all know what you thought of the play in the comments section down below. If you've seen it on Broadway, or if you've seen a U.S. regional production that has happened subsequently, let us know what you think of the writing. In the meantime, these are going to be my thoughts, and if you enjoy listening, make sure to subscribe right here on YouTube. Turn on those notifications so that you don't miss any of my upcoming theater reviews or go follow me on podcast platforms. But now it is time for us to talk about Fat Ham. So Fat Ham is a play written by James Ies. It premiered in 2021 at the Wilmer Theatre in Philadelphia. It subsequently was produced in New York. It won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It's now receiving its European premiere. It is, as I mentioned, a modern day adaptation of Hamlet, deliberately conceived and recontextualized through a contemporary Black American lens, in fact a black American queer lens, and with the geographical specificity of the American south as well, all factors which an American audience are presumably better equ equipped to either fully or partially recognize, which has made the play's journey across the pond interesting, to say the least. It's been fascinating experiencing this story and these characters with two very different demographics of audience. Because even though the audience in Stratford weren't necessarily picking up on all of the different American cultural references, like trying to figure out who was going to go first in a game of charades by guessing the date closest to Rick James's birthday, or subsequent References to the 1989 Spike Lee film Do the Right Thing, what they are really responding to, more so than the audience on Broadway, Broadway, is all of the parallels with Hamlet. And Shakespearean scholars can tell you far more than I about the extent to which these are littered throughout the script. But there are plenty of them, some prominent, some subtle, and they do an awful lot to help the audience, I think, in Stratford Upon Avon understand what it is that they're looking at. Because it can be a little bit emotionally distancing and a little tonally off putting. At the very beginning, when only a few lines into the play, one character is talking to another about eating his mama's box. And I'm not talking about picnic hampers, that line gets something of a reaction from an audience who perhaps aren't used to work at this venue being quite that crude. But the play's depth, cleverness and brilliance very quickly win this audience over. And it's difficult to stay mad at something as wild as this is and as zany and as silly as this is at times, while also being really intelligent as well. And even though in Stratford Upon Avon, which is basically a shrine to Shakespeare, you are going to encounter an audience who has a great deal of familiarity with the text and who understands these references, which has got to be really satisfying for the playwright. I also think it's utterly brilliant that this play, which is now getting produced throughout the US is reconceived Shakespeare through such an accessible lens. It is telling, emotionally speaking, the same story, even if it looks and sounds a little bit different. Even if in the first few minutes we have a character miming sex acts with a balloon and trying to fist bump a ghost. What I think I'm trying to say is just because this may be Hamlet as you have never seen Hamlet before, doesn't mean it's not Hamlet. Because sometimes Hamlet is a depressed Danish prince, sometimes he is an animated lion, and sometimes he is the son of a recently deceased cook in the American south, feeling ostracized as a young queer person in a black trying to pursue a HR qualification. We may not have all been there, but we can understand what it's like now. Since this is a play which achieves many different things. While asking extraordinarily little of us as an audience. I'm going to try and explain its many different facets in different sections, beginning with an explanation of the synopsis and its inherent relationship to Hamlet. So we meet our main protagonist, whose name, we learn, is Juicy, preparing for a family celebration with the help of his friend Tio. Now, as you will notice throughout this, many of the names of the characters in this play have a relationship to the characters that they represent from Hamlet. Juicy being Hamlet, but Tio being a little shortened, cute version of Horatio. And we can immediately tell that there is something deeply strange about what we are seeing here. The set is a thrust space within the Swan theater showing the back garden of this suburban home, and they are getting ready for a celebration. They are inflating balloons. And we find out that Juicy's mother has just recently got. Got married. But we can also see a wreath on an easel memorializing his recently dead father. Of course, this is Hamlet. His mother has just married his uncle, who he quickly learns may in fact be responsible for the death of his father. Long live the King style. Yes, I'm quoting the Lion King. Let us all understand Hamlet in our own ways. Juicy discovers this because his father, just like Hamlet's, appears to him as a ghost, first appearing to his friend Teo. There seem to be teething problems at play between the spiritual and human realm. And just in case anyone felt poised to mistake this for an utterly serious sort of a father son ghost apparition moment, he appears from underneath a gingham tablecloth in order to look more spooky and with all of the same pathos, as Hamlet's father tells his son, we got shit to do. In these few opening moments, we get a terrific sense of the breadth of this play's tone, that we can have this silly ghost humor that is inspired by this incredible and revered work of drama, and then we can have a very thoughtful take on it that comes from a different place. As Juicy muses, this is what I was raised in. Pig guts and bad choices. There's also a playful take on the concept of the Shakespearean play structurally, as Juicy, in conversation with his dead ghost father, turns and makes an aside to the audience. Only his father, breaking Shakespearean and dramatic rules, can still hear it. That same joke gets riffed on a little later when we meet Juicy's mom and she returns after he makes another aside and then, looking at his face, looks out to the audience and asks, what are you telling them? And it's in the relationship between Juicy, his mother and his uncle that we find the biggest parallel to Hamlet. But the play also, by being contemporary, is empowered to say something about modern family dynamics and complicated family dynamics, because there is a latent violence in the way that rev his uncle behaves towards Juicy, and his resentment of him is clear, his resentment of his queer characteristics. There's a momentary turn towards darkness as Juicy's mother fails to protect him from his uncle's aggressive outburst. Although the subsequent criticism that Juicy levels towards his mother evokes a response from her that reminds us that she hasn't had an enormity of choice in her lifetime either. She tells him that she went straight from her father's house to her husband's house and now immediately has remarried upon the death of that husband. And here, once again, we find pathos, benefit and wit in the recontextualization of Hamlet. Often when I talk about plays like this, people say, why not just write something original? Why root it to something that's already existed? Why not just write your own new play? And people do do all the time, more often than not, in fact. But the brilliance of something like this is that we are already, especially audience members who know Hamlet, looking at this piece with a certain understanding, and we are marrying our knowledge of that to this new narrative and to these characters. So we are to a certain extent predisposed to understand the direction that this is going to take and the relationships that we are going to see here. There are also, if we really boil it all down, only so many different types of relationships that we can display on stage. And when you get really into the daddy issues of it all, we are always kind of doing Hamlet to some extent in the same way that all feuding lovers end up looking a little bit like Beatrice and Benedick, and all star crossed young lovers end up looking a little bit like Romeo and Juliet. But much of the brilliance of Fat Ham is its ability to speak to contemporary audiences with more resonance, because we aren't explicitly relating to ancient royal Scandinavian drama, but what we can recognize is the frustrations of a young man whose college tuition has been spent by his mother and stepfather remodeling their bathroom. It doesn't have the same scale as Hamlet, but the emotion is still there. Similarly, Hamlet's mother, Gertrude, to my recollection, never talked to him about how thick he was. And that is thick with two Cs, in case the auto generated captions didn't quite pick up on that. And as we continue throughout the events of the play, it bears an inexact resemblance. We have other moments of asides and soliloquies, which are often played with structurally and often framed in a witty sort of way. We meet other supporting characters who I'll tell you about momentarily. We have a game of charades that Juicy attempts to manipulate in order to elicit a confession from his guilty father, like Hamlet with the play. And we have several lines and entirely lifted sections from Hamlet, including There's the Rub and what a Piece of Work is Man. And at one point, even an acknowledgement from Juicy that he is directly quoting Shakespeare, eliciting a response from his mother that he watches too much PBS and ought not to quote that dead white man one more time. Which, by the way, the audience of the rsc, loving, loving all of this. But as we continue through the play, though so many of the conversations that it is having are familiar of Hamlet, there is another dimension that it finds with its queer identity that feels new and distinct. Let's talk about Fat Ham and its queer characters. So there are a lot of interesting dynamics going on here because Juicy is openly gay in a community that is tolerant of that to a point, but also sort of quietly disapproving. He has very much the love and support of his own mother. It clearly evokes a frustration in his stepfather as well as his late father. But there's very little that he can do about it at this point. A few scenes into the play, guests arrive at the celebratory post wedding cookout, and Juicy finds an ally in Opal, who is an absolutely wild alternative for Ophelia. Opal is outspoken and boisterous and queer and resents the dress that her mother has forced her to wear and dreams of opening a shooting alley slash restaurant because to her mind, that is a combination of the two things that people in the community love to do. And Opal, like all of the characters that we meet in this play, is initially a vibrant comic force who attains a layer of depth, particularly as she interrupts a soliloquy aside from Juicy. And every creative aspect of this production is in on this joke because the lights dim, there is a spot focus on Juicy as he addresses the audience. And by all theatrical logic, we understand that nobody else can perceive this happening on stage except for the fact that Opal can interrupt him, asks what he's doing and co opts the narrative that he is crafting in order to challenge, challenge him a little bit about his life and the way that he is living it and the choices that he's making. Opal questions why Juicy would want to pursue something like hr, which is exactly what her own mother wishes that she would do later on in the play. And it's clear that each of them occupies a little bit of space in the world that they envy of each other. And they would like to be able to do what the other is permitted to by society, which is very familiar to the queer experience. And that's what this initially traditional soliloquy evolves into. It becomes a sort of a conclave between kindred spirit queer cousins at a stressful family barbecue with conservative opinions flying around. And that's before we get to Larry. Not Laertes, but Larry. Now, Larry is Opal's brother. And unlike Opal, who is opinionated and vocal, Larry is quite subdued. He arrives in a military uniform. He is the pride of his vivacious church lady mother. But immediately we can tell that there is some kind of unspoken tension between him and Juicy. There is something existing in the past that needs to be addressed and which we get the sense is going to be addressed before the end of the play. And this revelation arrives around the beginning of the second half of this one act drama as Larry brokers a conversation with Juicy and we are able to discern the true nature of their relationship. At exactly this moment, the play metamorphosizes into something more sophisticated and the language becomes beautiful and poetic again, not unlike Shakespeare. A lot of the lines here and a lot of the ideas articulated particularly by Larry, feels like an homage to the way that love is characterized and explained in Shakespearean sonnets, only once again realized through the aperture of contemporary language. As Larry tells Juicy, I want to be soft. I want to bless someone with how soft I can be. And a lot of what he's talking about here is the envy that he has of Juicy, who, through no fault of his own and with little decision of his own, it seems, is openly queer because of the way that he presents to the world. Larry, meanwhile, is repressed and less obviously so when considering the prospect of admitting his romantic feelings towards Juicy. He has this beautiful line where he says, you feel like a fabric that costs too much. That cost being the enormous, enormous price of honesty and what that would mean for Larry. But beyond the familiar unrequited closeted queer trauma, we also have interesting conversations about more modern issues affecting the gay community. There is an outing of one character by another. There is a hysterical sort of darkly comic satire on toxic masculinity and homophobia as one character refuses the Heimlich from a gay character literally choosing choking to death on a piece of barbecued meat rather than being embraced from behind by a homosexual. Much of what fat ham becomes about as this tone adapts and metamorphosizes is the frustrations of a younger generation who feel disempowered and disenfranchised and who eventually shout their aspirations into a megaphone. Whether that is a shooting alley restaurant, whether that is a HR qualification, whether that is becoming a drag performer. All of it moving, truthful, raucous and wildly unexpected in this mashup between classical Shakespeare and the Cosby Show. It is staggeringly dramatic, it is eye wateringly funny, it is so sophisticated. And that is thanks to the extraordinary writing from James Iams as well as the brilliant direction originally from Sahim Ali and for this production by Sadiq Herd. But we also have to talk about this fantastic cast.
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Now Elisa Adele stars as Juicy, which as a role is not quite Hamlet in its breadth and its CH challenge, but it's not without its complications as well, because here you have a character who is described as being soft and effeminate, but who, when we meet him for the first time, is also morose and somber because he is refusing to celebrate the wedding, which is arriving so soon on the heels of his father's death. He is wearing all black, but it's black dungarees over a mesh top. So to make a point, he is perpetually dressed for a funeral. But it's a gay funeral, if we're being honest. And the most affecting quality I think, of his performance is how pensive it is and how thoughtful it is. And there is considerable wit and there is considerable pain in there as well. But this is a piece of drama that is so constantly somersaulting between the comic and the dramatic. I mean, there is real hurt and there is real betrayal, but everyone also recovers from this at such a rapid pace in that way that family can Sul Rimmy plays both Pap, the ghost of Juicy's father, as well as Rev, his uncle and new stepfather. There's a pretty brilliant line early on when he appears as Rev after first being seen as Pap and he says, do I look like Pap to you? To which the reply is a pause before yes. He is intimidating with a real palpable danger about him, but also a silliness all of his own. Andy Osho, who is a celebrated comedian, plays Teedra, Juicy's mother. This is one of the characters who I recall being so sensationally show stopping on Broadway, and I think with this production here in the uk, many of the accents are not quite of the same genuine quality as with the American production. As you would expect, at a certain point I stopped caring about accents and how accurate they are because, you know, we're doing the play in different places and that's going to happen. I do also think that culturally, some of the nuances of these characters as they're making jokes about Ms. Cleo and whatnot are perhaps a little further from the fingertips of the actors here. But the moment when she performs 100% Pure Love on the karaoke machine with exotic choreography remains show stopping. And one of the best parts of her performance, I think, is the spontaneity. There's a moment when she's trying to mount a table in anticipating this big performance that she has prepared for her new husband and she can't quite climb up onto it in the way that she wants to in her little denim shorts. And there is a look to the audience after we've laughed, which is so brilliantly timed. Jasmine Alcock plays Opal I've enjoyed Jasmine on stage before, but this is something else. She is wonderful in this role. Her wide eyes are the most expressive window to the mania of this character. She is a fantastic and endearing comic presence in the play, as is her mother, Rabi, who is played by Sandra Marvin, who is as ever an utter delight on the stage. She is costumed like a conservative church lady, all in purple, and then the cookout brings situations and revelations that she wasn't necessarily anticipating. She does a pretty good job of taking it all in her stride and developing and growing an awful lot as a character in a short space of time. She is hilariously funny when they are playing charades and she's getting competitive and she is leaping to her feet and shouting even when it's not her turn. Very, very funny and a big part of many of the play's funniest moments when we to sincerity. More often than not, it is the work of Cory Montague Chalet as Larry Corey is giving a heartfelt and beautiful and more than anything Else a sensitive performance in this role. Such beautiful line readings of passionate material. And helpfully, his is probably the character alongside Juicy, who feels the most like a genuine human being on stage, with everyone else being sort of deliberately hypersaturated. In its first 45 minutes or so, this doesn't feel like a play that is going to have the capacity to really affect you emotionally. But when life, Larry is asking Juicy, can you save me? It's really moving. Now, there is one final performance that I haven't yet mentioned. This is Kieran Taylor Ford, who plays Juicy's friend Tia. We see him right at the beginning, and he then returns high at the end, perhaps surprisingly animated and energetic, considering, but so funny that I don't even care. He brings with him an exchange which nods to one of the most famous lines in Hamlet, not to be or not to be. The other one. He asks Juicy, you remember Yorick? And then explains that Yorick has recently overdosed in the back seat of his car. I him tell told you Shakespeare threw a different lens. And rather than anyone brandishing the skull on stage, Tio is wearing his sneakers. And after a revealing conversation between the characters who find themselves left together in the garden, Tio then launches into this bizarre monologue about a dream that he had about an encounter with a gingerbread. And I think it speaks strikingly to the skill and dexterity of James Iams that we can, in such a short space of time, time move from the conclusion of this, which is the visual picture of children, Cover your ears ejaculating over an imaginary gingerbread man to a place of legitimate and significant philosophical depth. How the hell do we get from one of these places to the other? I mean, the line and then the gingerbread man goes down on you is a hell of a place for us to be in the first instance. But that we can so soon afterwards get to a place where we are saying something really important, and articulating that meaningfully is staggering to me. What a playwright this is. And moments afterwards, if you're of the opinion that it hadn't already, the whole thing descends into utter chaos and satire. It is wild, but so is the entire play. This is an extraordinary piece of theater. I love work like this that has an expansive and an evolving tone that metamorphosizes throughout and can turn towards sincerity and can be moving and can be hilarious and raucous and ridiculous. Ridiculous and serious all at the same time. And I think perhaps more than anything else, it's really exciting that Shakespearean works are continuing to inspire such different interpretations so many generations later. I think that this is an unmissable play for theatre fans, for Shakespeare fans. Go and check it out while it is running at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford Upon Avon or at a theatre near you. And if you already have, let us know what you think of fat ham in the comments section down below. Those have been my thoughts. I would love to hear yours. In the meantime, thank you so much for listening to my review. I hope that you enjoyed if you did and you would like to hear more of my theatre reviews. You can find them right here on YouTube. Make sure that you subscribe and turn on notifications so you don't miss my upcoming reviews or go follow me on podcast platforms. I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a stagey day.
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For 10 more seconds, I'm Mickey Jo Theatre. Oh my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a stagey day.
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