Alas! Poor Yorick

An entertaining excavation of work and political systems through the eyes of the gravediggers in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Alas! Poor Yorick draws on David Graeber, Marx and popular culture to present a relentless critique of our institutional failings, hypocritical cultural mores and political inadequacies wrapped up in a 70-minute largely silent clown show. 
 
Alas! Poor Yorick represents the culmination of Ridiculusmus’s lifetime obsession with Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet.’

Beyond the means of a small-scale theatre company to mount a full scale production of the classic tragedy, the artistic partnership of Jon Haynes and David Woods pulls out every trick in their theatre playbook to create a Stoppardian take on the gravediggers from ‘Hamlet’. Re-enacting all the preceding acts of the original and meticulously staging the famous graveyard scene in all its four hundred and twenty year-old glory.

Flipping the original slide into chaos and mistaken murders into an existential clown piece, that is beautiful and oddly moving, the prevaricating protagonist is offered in a refreshingly less flattering light.