This summer, nothing was rotten in the state of Denmark, but rather the state of Scotland. Students from the Advanced Acting class performed four shows of Hamlet in Scotland from July 29 to Aug. 11, marking the final shows of the class’s production.
On March 13 and 16, the cast opened the performance for the Piedmont community in the Alan Harvey Theater. Then, after a year of preparation, they flew off to the Fringe Festival in Scotland.
“I guess I started the process of looking into Hamlet a year ago, July, maybe June” Wes Dunlap, class of 2014, said. “We first started talking about it in May, but that was before the whole audition. So I read it over the summer, and we auditioned [in September of 2013].”
Although the first performances were in March, the cast did not revisit the play until July with one more performance locally before heading off to Scotland.
“It was so cool having time to come back to the show,” Dunlap, who starred in the lead role of Hamlet, said.
The smaller Fringe Festival venue left the group with less flexibility in the performance and less time to practice on set. Adaptations had to be made, including a slightly different cast. Grant Gadbois, class of 2014, filled in for Julia Pitner, class of 2014 on the roles of Guildenstern and Marcellus.
“There are a lot of new reflections with the material, so you have to adapt to a lot of different things that are put upon you.” Dunlap said.
Playing with different aspects and building a new performance is partially that recreation, but also the experience gained from repetition.
“It’s kind of the nature of being in a play to become your character,” senior Becca Havian, who played Queen Gertrude, said. “You have to become your character repeatedly throughout a short period of time and… you’re reacting to the other people in the play as your character would. It creates a whole different dynamic outside of the play. I think it forced us to get really close. By the end of the trip, we were all like family.”
By practicing as frequently as the group did, they formed a comradery.
“Especially with a play like Hamlet that’s very dramatic, you sort of have to open yourself. You need to show the people who you’re doing the play with sides of you that you don’t show everyone, sides that not a lot of people see,” Dunlap said.
This was easier for Piedmont’s acting class than other groups, senior Sophie Nadler said. The small size of the cast meant more time to bond and become a tight knit group.
“There were some people that I spoke to and they had fifty people in their group,” Nadler said. “We knew someone who used to go to Piedmont, Sarah Jinich. who goes to Deerfield now. She was also there, and she said, ‘You guys were all so close. We don’t even talk to the rest of our group.’ Since we were a small group, it was easy for us to just stick together.”
Dunlap was disappointed to leave Scotland after the two week trip.
“It was really rough coming down from that and not doing it anymore,” Dunlap said. “It was a pretty harsh transition from being able to experience everything that you’d experience every night up on stage, and then going from one hundred to nothing in the course of a week.”
Although the experience ended and there will be no more performances, Havian and Nadler keep learning new interpretations of the play in AP English.
“I think that’s the case with a lot of Shakespeare plays,” Havian said. “They can be interpreted in so many ways and nothing is set in stone. Even now after a year, we’re still learning about it.”
