Next up in our Camden Fringe Featured Show series: after acclaim on tour, transgender theatremaker Edward/Edalia Day brings Super Hamlet 64, a new comedy about “videogames and death” and Shakespeare, to London for two festival dates at the Cockpit Theatre on 17 and 18 August 2018.
A one-person, comedy spoken word show about videogames and the Bard… Three years ago, poetry slam winner Edward/Edalia Day set about rewriting Hamlet using only videogame quotes. 400 hours of playing later, they’ve come up with the wildest Shakespeare experience you’re ever likely to see.
What if you woke up and realised that your life was actually a computer game? Your Dad just died, your Uncle’s married your Mum and is hell-bent on world domination, while the person you have a crush on turns out to be a samurai sword-wielding superhero. Oh, and your Dad’s a singing ghost.
In Super Hamlet 64 – the show’s title, as any gamer will know, refers to Super Mario 64, one of the most popular games for late 1990s gaming console, the Nintendo 64 – singing ghosts, philosophical zombie shootouts and an epic boss battle between a Samurai sword-wielding Ophelia and a giant mechanical beast are just a handful of the surprising turns the show takes.
Edward/Edalia says, despite how surreal the play is, they’re keen to stay true to the themes of the original piece:
“Hamlet is about a boy struggling to cope with death. Videogames are a medium where you die a million times but never truly die.”
This fast-paced retelling of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy combines the classical text with modern poetry to dissect ideas about privilege, gender and mortality today. Full of retro animation and comedy songs, it also takes stylistic inspiration from films like Scott Pilgrim vs the World.
Super Hamlet 64 was nominated for best new writing, best production and best actor at the Buxton Fringe, and was picked as one of the top two spoken word recommendations at this year’s Camden Fringe by London Calling.
Show trailer
About Edward/Edalia Day
Edward/Edalia Day. © Michael Wharley
Edward/Edalia Day is a transgender/non-binary spoken word artist, animator and theatremaker based in Norwich. They trained in classical acting at the Academy of Live and Recorded Arts (ALRA) in London and in mime and physical theatre at the revered Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris. In their 13 years of freelance acting, they’ve performed in a wealth of Shakespeare productions with notable roles including Bottom, Malvolio, Hamlet, Prospero and King Lear.
Their first self-produced show, In the Surface of a Bubble (2014), used martial arts and masks to tell the story of where our dreams come from. This year they are also touring Too Pretty to Punch, a one-person show about transphobia and what it feels like living outside of all the boxes.
Day’s theatre is known for its stunning visuals, explosive movement and exhilarating video projection, with comedy and a child-like sense of play at the heart of everything he makes.
