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The Guardian

Hamlet: Wakefulness review – fraught and full-throated musical tragedy

It begins with lines from Under the Earth I Go, a reflective piece about death and renewal, written as his own elegy by the Scottish poet Hamish Henderson. That serves as a suitably contemplative introduction to Shakespeare's death-fixated play, one that begins after the poisoning of one Hamlet and ends with the slaughter of another. Wrocław's Song of the Goat gravitates naturally to such material. This least frivolous of companies made its name on the fringe in 2004 with Chronicles: A Lamentation, an expressive dance-theatre piece shot through with haunting polyphonic song that felt placeless and timeless. The company is in full voice here in Grzegorz Bral's response to Shakespeare's play, the music more recognisably of a western operatic tradition, but no less rich and resonant. Gorgeous though the singing is, with its waves of tightly drilled choral sound sometimes accompanied by the bowed string instrument known as a nyckelharpa, the production seems uninterested in saying anything fresh about Hamlet. Packed into an hour, it is set on the night of the old king's murder and features the familiar characters – a resolute Claudius, an obstinate Ophelia and an angry Gertrude, as well as an indignant Hamlet – but makes no attempt to explore them in depth. There is a smattering of speeches, heavily accented and hard to make sense of, and a couple of anachronistic additions ('The end justifies the means,' says Claudius; 'Quiet bitch,' says old Hamlet for no apparent reason), but only the sketchiest sense of a narrative arc. And that is a problem because when emotion is detached from action, it comes across as histrionic. The mood is sombre, fraught and intense, but to what ends? It leaves the characters looking two-dimensional and crudely old-fashioned. A primarily sung piece, Hamlet – Wakefulness scores highly on gothic ferocity, less so on dramatic purpose. At Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 15 August All our Edinburgh festival reviews