Dickie Beau in Re-Member Me. Picture: Sarah Lewis

You recognize when you’re about 10 minutes into watching a play and suppose: ‘I am actually having fun with this; it may be nice’? That is how I felt watching Dickie Beau’s Re-Member Me at Hampstead Theatre.

It begins with Beau lip-synching over interviews with actors who’ve performed Hamlet previously. The physique language and facial expressions are exceptionally skilful and exact; it’s just like the voice has a physique or the physique a voice. 

The dialogue reveals greater than perception into what it’s like enjoying the much-coveted function of the ‘The Dane’; it illuminates an arrogance and pretension. It’s laugh-out-loud humorous in locations.

Re-Member Me then focuses on Richard Eyre’s manufacturing of Hamlet on the Nationwide Theatre in 1989, which initially starred Daniel Day-Lewis. Clips of interviews with these concerned or who noticed it get an analogous lip-sync therapy, and once more, it is an enchanting and infrequently amusing behind-the-scenes have a look at a manufacturing of Hamlet.

The main focus then stays on Ian Charleson, who finally took over the function of Hamlet after Day-Lewis pulled out. Interviews with Eyre, associates and actors who knew Charleson are lip-synched over video footage of 4 Dickie Beau ‘speaking heads’ projected above the stage.

Joking and digs are put to 1 aspect as Charleson was very in poor health with AIDS when he took on the function. However the prolonged use of the video speaking head’s system means it begins to lose its energy.

I discovered myself watching Beau shifting the various store mannequins across the stage and folding up the costumes that had been scattered round. Charleson’s story is tinged with tragedy, a expertise and profession lower brief, however I hankered after the enjoyable, frivolity and perception of the sooner components of the play.

As soon as the interviews are completed, there’s a very lengthy montage of scenes from Chariots of Hearth of Charleson working; it felt like a laboured strategy to emphasise the vitality he as soon as had.

Re-Member Me begins as an attention-grabbing but light-hearted play about actors enjoying Hamlet and morphs right into a type of homage to Ian Charleson.

Consequently, the opening part was tonally very totally different to what the play finally turns into, and whereas attention-grabbing and technically good, I left with combined emotions.

I am giving it ⭐️⭐️⭐️.

Re-Member Me, Hampstead Theatre

Written and carried out by Dickie Beau

Directed by Jan Willem Van Den Bosch

Working time: 75 minutes with out an interval

Reserving till 17 June; for extra data and to purchase tickets, go to the Hampstead Theatre

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