The Rehearsal, Playing the Dane

In Pan Pan’s purgatorial presentation of Shakespeare’s classic tragedy, you as the audience are faced with a choice: who is to be, or not to be, Hamlet? Actors compete to play the title role, but as we enter the graveyard world of this icon of individualism, can anyone escape playing the Dane? Highly innovative and visually breathtaking, this is an audacious and irreverent riff on Hamlet that does not so much update or deconstruct the play as it does explode it. Playing fast and loose with our familiarity and expectations, the onstage Director rations out Shakespeare’s text, knowingly excavating its layers in a series of theatrical devices and conceits that focuses the large cast, and the audience, on the existential plight of its characters. The Rehearsal, Playing the Dane was winner of the 2010 Irish Times Theatre Awards for Best Production and Best Design. Last in New York with The Crumb Trail in January 2009, Ben Brantley for the New York Times called Pan Pan”[A] present-tense theater company who knows what [it’s] doing.”