Fat Ham at the RSC’s Swan Theatre – review

So far this year, the Royal Shakespeare Company has offered up two versions of the Bard’s great tragedy about the Prince of Denmark. One seemed to be set on board the Titanic, another depended on a mash-up with the Radiohead album Hail to the Thief. Now there’s a third to add to the list.

This one is by far the most radical, largely abandoning the original text – apart from one or two judiciously chosen soliloquies – to reimagine the play as a kind of extended ’90s sitcom, complete with slapstick, comedy relatives and a boldly unexpected ending.

It’s a show that won playwright James Ijames a Pulitzer Prize when it played in New York in 2022, first off-Broadway before transferring onto the Great White Way itself, and the RSC has bagged the European premiere in a co-production with its original US team.

Relocated to the American South, where a family barbecue in a back garden celebrates the wedding of Tedra and Rev, the fundamental action remains reassuringly familiar: the main character – here a queer Black college student renamed Juicy – is struggling with issues of identity when the ghost of his father turns up to seek revenge for his indirect killing by his treacherous brother Rev. Polonius is replaced by the God-fearing Rabby, while her children Opal and Larry stand in for Ophelia and Laertes, respectively. Throw in Juicy’s mate Tio (Horatio), and all the pieces are in place for an affectionate, if raucous, parody of the source material.

There are some cracking lines and smart ideas – a game of charades works particularly well as a cipher for the play within a play – but some are stretched beyond credulity and undermine the cleverness of the fundamental approach. Rev’s comeuppance is at the hands of fate rather than Juicy, for instance, while Juicy himself (no spoiler this time) acts out of character at a crucial moment in the denouement, purely to serve a plot point and enable a Drag Race-style lip-sync finale.

Performances vary wildly, with lots of playing up to the audience for laughs in the way that sitcoms often do, and, perhaps inevitably, the characterisations lean too far towards caricature. The cast also seems to find the audience’s presence somehow surprising, rushing on inaudibly with lines without allowing room for the laughs to fall.

As for production values, Maruti Evans’s set design could have come straight out of an Ayckbourn play and Sideeq Heard’s adaptation of Saheem Ali’s original direction feels rather like an end-on show contorted to fit the Swan’s thrust stage. But there are also some standout illusions (Skylar Fox) that are highly effective and genuinely impressive, while the rollicking pace of the 100-minute, no-interval show never slackens.

And regardless of any misgivings – it’s encouraging to see something fresh and off-the-wall on stages that bear the sometimes deadening weight of centuries of tradition.