My own favourite was the hip-hop Othello, but the backwards Hamlet ran it close. It was pretty much all good; another special mention must go to the history plays as an American Football game with the crown being passed from one player to another with a foul called against King Lear because of a fictional character on the pitch. Ironically - fitting that there was irony given that the man invented it, or at least stole it from the Greeks - the least funny part was the quick run through of the comedies. The joke was supposedly that they are all the same: cross-dressing, twins, shipwrecks and so on. True enough, but we all knew that anyway.
They spent the entire second half on Hamlet, performing it four times in all. Whereas Tom Stoppard made a play out of thrusting minor characters to the fore, this bunch do away with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern completely (do you see what I did there?) and reduce the play within a play to a puppet show. But I think both recognise the essential duality of Hamlet; one the one hand possibly the greatest play ever written in English and on the other hand an inherently absurd melodrama. As Stoppard himself said "The bad end unhappily; the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.".
Anyway, I laughed and that's enough for me.
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