Edinburgh Festivals

Fringe 2001

Hamlet by Freud
Quaker Meeting House

Patrick Hayes

Hamlet by Freud is the story of an aging psychoanalyst and Hamlet obsessive, who expounds boring theories before falling asleep and having boring dreams.

The story concerns an aging Hamlet-obsessed psychoanalyst (played by Daniel Foley) who is initially presented to us, sitting in an armchair, moaning about his frustrated acting ambitions. The psychoanalyst then gives an apparently serious rant about how Shakespeare saw himself as Hamlet and suffered from a range of conditions, including the classic Oedipus complex. This continues for about five minutes until he finally drifts off to sleep, fortunately just beating the audience.

The play then seems to show promise, apparently drifting into the surreal dream world of the sleeping psychoanalyst. What follows is initially interesting: the narrative becomes fragmented, there are snippets of Shakespeare and surreal sequences where the psychoanalyst frequently meets with another character, blandly portrayed by Risako Ataka. The psychoanalyst's character shifts in a dreamlike, fragmented fashion, from one persona to another: an actor who talks to a silent psychiatrist about his frustration with being unable to be his 'ideal Hamlet', Oedipus, Hamlet himself. The whole time, however, the audience is waiting to see where all this is going...although after 15 minutes or so it becomes obvious that it's going nowhere fast and the mind starts to wander.

The play offers no direction; its sole ambition seems to be to present theatrically the dream world of the psychoanalyst, which is a pointless, clichéd and tedious world of uninspiring forced surrealism with obvious Freudian undertones. Seeing as this was all done without a hint of irony, it appears that this in itself is intended to be sufficient to captivate the audience. Daniel Foley's acting skills are commendable, if slightly unsubtle; however the script is so dreadful it is doubtless very hard for him to attain much empathy with the multitude of different characters he has to portray. Foley is not off the hook, however, as he wrote the bloody thing.

Hamlet by Freud fails miserably, regardless of the fact that it doesn't seem to have particularly high aims anyway. One leaves thinking that an hour's sleep with one's own dreams for entertainment would be preferable.