Stage/Toronto Fringe 2024

What: You, Hamlet
Where: East End United, 310 Danforth Ave.
When: Every day at 8:00 pm, until Sun., July 14 (dark on Tue.)
Highlight: A profound, almost existential use of audience participation.
Rating: NNNN (out of 5)
Why you should go: Audience-specific performance company DopoLavoro Teatrale is experimenting with a classic for the first time — and doing it with rigour.

AUDIENCE-SPECIFIC performance company DopoLavoro Teatrale (DLT) is experimenting with a classic for the first time. Every night, a group of just 20 audience members is invited to witness the 90-minute world premiere of You, Hamlet, playing at East End United church on the Danforth.

Few iambs are spoken in this collective creation helmed by DLT artistic director Daniele Bartolini. Instead, actors Danya Buonastella, Marta Zannoner and Nolan Molfetta pair a walking tour with an associatively structured journey through a bevy of physical, emotional and intellectual ideas about Hamlet. These explorations vary wildly in form, the one constant being that none of the actors plays Hamlet: the audience does.

Although You, Hamlet is billed as a “hybrid of role-play game and art installation,” the audience spectates the performers in silence for most of the show’s first half, with direct address — and a bit of touch — providing brief ruptures of this relatively conventional dynamic. But toward the end, the audience participation ramps up in profound ways. Without revealing too much, You, Hamlet gets at the existential questions raised by Shakespeare’s tragedy more directly than any traditional production I’ve seen. It doesn’t just riff on the play but meditates on the long-lasting effects it’s had on artists, students and audiences alike.

Not everything works; the final scene, in particular, felt rather anticlimactic. But it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a production explore this many ideas this rigorously. And the brilliantly physical work of both Zannoner and Buonastella ensures every scene is at least interesting. I very much hope this sold-out production returns in some form so that more people can have the experience of playing the infamous Dane.