Hamlet & Angad

Details

Ticket Price:	₹ 300
Genre:	Comedy
Duration:	80 mins without an interval
Age:	16 years and above
Playwright:	Written by Thomas Manuel Music by Mohamed Shameer Choreography by Aparnaa Nagesh Produced by Crea-Shakthi
Director:	Harish Adithya
Cast:	Vaishwath Shankar, Karthik Anantha Subramanian, Yugesh RV, Siddhartha Bhaskara, Padma Murali & Dushyanth Gunashekar

There is a strange parallel between Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Angad in Valmiki’s Ramayan. Both are princes.

In both stories, the paternal uncle kills the father and marries the mother. This sets up an epic tale of revenge and duty in Hamlet. Angad, however, hardly blinks and his lack of moral deliberation can be interpreted in many ways. Winner of The Hindu Best Play Award of 2016, Hamlet and Angad instead focuses on the characters and their own emotional journeys.

In Hamlet and Angad, the two characters (or people claiming to be them) are patients in an asylum, trapped in a strange, psychological landscape that each struggles to escape from. Both receive news about the death of their father. Hamlet seeks vengeance and urges Angad to help him escape. But Angad is not interested in revenge. He seeks redemption through his love for Tarani. Hamlet and Angad wrestle with ideas of family and identity in this absurdist adventure story – and they do it with poetry and rhyme.