Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the 1000 small uncaring ways. - Stephen Vincent Benet

Presented by Brisbane-based company The Danger Ensemble, The Hamlet Apocalypse is, very simply, a contemporary performance about a group of actors staging Shakespeare’s Hamlet on the eve of the apocalypse. As the reality of the situation sinks in, the line between fiction and reality blurs: the actors, the characters and their worlds are distilled into the most base of human states.

Hamlet is the perfect partner for this impending fiction. The broad plot arc is interwoven with the actors’ story and as the cast counts down to the apocalypse, their own fears, insecurities and personalities reveal some of Shakespeare’s most existential texts concrete in their urgency.

This work is a dystopia of the now generation, it is a silent party, a desperate plea and a rambunctious prayer .Above all, the work at its absolute heart is about humanity, the power of death and the value of life.

Real Time Arts – Review, September 2011
Written by DOUGLAS LEONARD

“In the Hamlet Apocalypse, director Steven Mitchell Wright and dramaturgChris Beckey with The Danger Ensemble players and the crucial assistance of sound and light creatives Dane Alexander and Ben Hughes have produced a tour de force of raw, physical theatre pertinent to Generation Y.

There was no attempt to deconstruct Shakespeare’s Hamlet but instead to distil its essence, a project which electrically proved itself along the nerves of an entranced audience. Their energy and passion drew in the audience, creating poignant vignettes often absurd, comical or heart-breaking and presented in a fashion that created the sheer goddamned beauty of life, howsoever bitter the knowledge that these golden lads and lasses we so briefly come to know must, implacably, come to dust.

What I admired about The Danger Ensemble was that they seemed to be working at full pitch not merely to break the mould of expectation regarding a familiar cultural artefact, but to emulate the tentative, flowing, continually improvised balancing act of life itself. “

ArtsHub – Review, 29 August 2011
Written by SIMON TATE

“If you were facing the end, what would you do in your last hour? The answer for seven actors is to continue their rehearsal of Hamlet, come what may.

This production by The Danger Ensemble as part of La Boite’s Indie Season is simply astounding, real – heart-wrenchingly real – shambolic, chaotic, philosophical, whimsical, hilarious, empathic, angry… how many adjectives can you use to describe the nature of life condensed into its last 65 minutes?

Rating: Five stars*****

Photography by Morgan Roberts