Hotel Elsinore

More Things in Heaven and Urn

Hotel Elsinore

by Susanna Hamnett

Plant[UnLtd] at the Riverside Studios, Hammersmith until 3^rd May

Review by Claire Alexander,

Students of Hamlet will recognise Elsinore as Hamlet’s castle in Shakespeare’s play of the same name. In Susanna Hamnett’s play it is the jumping off point for her clever and insightful exploration of how Hamlet’s story can mirror one individual family’s experience. ‘Art imitates life’ in a believable and interesting way.

Venerable old actor Henry Elder has recently died, ut his family need to fulfil his last wish of attending the annual Shakespeare festival in Elsinore. So, together with his ashes — in a prominent urn — which they talk to as if he were ever present, they arrive at the rundown hotel. It’s 2.00am and a thunderstorm is raging. We learn that Henry’s family’s lives have become completely subsumed by his one-man production of Hamlet which he has obsessively made his own. When the director of the festival suddenly rings to ask that they perform the play the following morning in his stead they are thrown into confusion and panic! But they must obey Henry’s command from his grave. A little bit of dramatic licence here — what director of a festival is finalising his programme at 2.00am for the following morning, or maybe they are !!!

What follows is the family’s attempt to rehearse something akin to Hamlet they can take to the festival in a few hours time. It seems a project doomed to fail. Without their patriarchal leader they are lost: the alcoholic highly strung wife, Henry Jr who is doing his best to take his father’s place, and reluctant daughter Olivia who wishes she were anywhere but Elsinore.

Slowly and effortlessly we are drawn into the family’s struggles, as they seem to echo Hamlet’s own. The son who has lost his father, angry with him as he has ignored him for his own obsessions; the mother who has always wanted to play Gertrude and be the heroine, but who is cast into the shadows and driven to drink by the blinkered obsessions of her husband; and the daughter who has drowned in lost love — a clever analogy here with Ophelia’s ‘mad speech’.

In the clever, fast-moving text the audience is drawn more and more into Hamlet’s world. Susanna Hamnett (who also plays the grieving wife of Henry Elder; and the Gertrude that she has always craved) has not only taken the essential, most familiar parts of Hamlet (seen through that doomed Prince’s perspective), but as Hotel Elsinore progresses we get so much insight into the analogies with this directionless family.

Whilst the structure and idea of the play is intelligent and thoughtful, I did have some reservations: perhaps there is only a sketchy detail of the family’s relationships with each other, which means that you come away thinking more about Hamlet, the play, rather than the Elder family. But perhaps that is what Hamnett intended. Certainly you come away knowing you have seen a cleverly abridged version of Hamlet — if sometimes a procession of all the familiar speeches!

Hotel Elsinore stated life on the Edinburgh Fringe in 2022 and still bears the hallmarks of that origin — a breeding ground for making theatre with new ideas and minimal resources. I note that Hamnett has a particular interest in ‘breaking the fourth wall’ – certainly she has achieved that within the production and the seamless way in which the family ease in and out of their retelling of Hamlet. It is played with agility and grace, and imaginative use of the basic iron bed frames of the hotel room to represent a ‘set’ of Hamlet.

I applaud the three actors, Susanna Hamnett’s performance as the slightly manic, longing Gertrude, is well judged; Joshua MacGregor gives a confident, honest performance as Henry Jr, trying hard to bring his family together and assuage the death of his father; Lily MacGregor brings a nice blend of fragility and diffidence to Olivia-Ophelia. Lily is primarily a dancer and this certainly gave a sense of real centredness to her performance. Beware that this is not at the expense of vocal projection however.

The whole production is very pacey. Actors move seamlessly from their roles in the family to multi-roles in their version of Hamlet. Indeed the three actors constantly alternate roles in the latter, which could make it hard to follow at times. It is not often that I would remark that something is a bit too fast, but at times you needed to take breath and reflect. At just seventy minutes long, with no interval, another five minutes might help the dynamics of the production and all the relationships on show.

I will leave the last word to my companion, who would not at all describe herself as a scholar of Hamlet, who commented, slightly ruefully, that she wished she had read that play in order to get the most from this production. But on the other hand the echoes are clearly drawn and kept us discussing afterwards, always the hallmark of a good play. And brings Shakespeare and his enormous emotional insight right into the living room of a modern day family and its struggles.

Hotel Elsinore could be a journey of grief and of life after grief, but equally a clever exploration of Shakespeare’s text and its reflection in modern life. If the former, perhaps I needed more; if the latter, revise your Hamlet first!

Claire Alexander, April 2025

Photography by Ben Wulf