As part of the Shakespeare Festival, the Roman Theatre’s stage is hosting a new run of the cult production that cemented Filippo Timi’s reputation as a maverick genius.
A production that reinterprets the Bard in an explosive manner, in which every gesture and every syllable becomes a game, an intimate voice and an intellectual provocation.
Timi turns the sacred Shakespearean text on its head, overturning its passions and archetypes within an electric circus cage – the setting for an unprecedented celebration of madness.
It is a disconcerting Hamlet: comic, furious, and wildly colourful.
Tragedy is transformed into comedy: Timi’s Hamlet is a bored prince, a weary hero who refuses to play out the usual, monotonous, familiar script; he no longer wishes to love Ophelia, no longer wishes to seek revenge, no longer wishes to exist. Whilst off-stage voices call him in vain to a destiny already written, creatures born of his unstable mind orbit around him.
Paradoxically, it is precisely this relentless, corrosive irony that lifts the veil: by dismantling the plot, it sculpts the characters’ pain with surgical precision. What explodes onto the stage is a savage madness, yet one that is miraculously healthy and vital – the only authentic response in the face of the excruciating realisation of the world’s vanity. A theatre of courage and honesty, which probes Shakespearean mysteries to present us with a ‘Hamlet squared’, brimming with form, content and genius. A total experience that promises and delivers the shock of beauty.
