Rehab For Actors Recovering From Playing Hamlet

A few minutes into this interview, I realise I am barking up the wrong tree. I had the idea that Hamlet Camp, a new work premiering at Carriageworks in Sydney written by and starring three notable Australian ex-Hamlets – Brendan Cowell, Ewen Leslie and Toby Schmitz – was going to be one of those chummy, anecdote-based affairs. Three good pals, sitting on stools, jawing about playing the Dane. Proper luvvy actor stuff.

But 10 minutes into our chat, Cowell pipes up: “It’s a play. You know that, right?”

Though Hamlet Camp draws on each of the three actors’ experiences playing the prince of Denmark, Hamlet Camp is a fiction, they are keen to stress. “We’re not playing ourselves!” Leslie insists. “We’re playing three actors who have all played Hamlet who meet in a kind of rehab facility specifically for guys who have played Hamlet.”

“Think Elsinore in Byron Bay,” Schmitz says.

This rehab-for-Hamlets looks ritzy but there are strict rules for residents – and punishments. “The rules of the rehab are a bit Ionesco or Beckett, with a bit of French farce on the side,” Schmitz explains. “One conceit we’re playing with, for example, is that if you start quoting too much from the play, you get an electric shock through a neck implant.”

Aversion therapy for actors? “Well, yeah, they’re addicts,” Cowell says. “But instead of it being methamphetamine or something, it’s this play by Shakespeare that they can’t get out of their systems.”

Schmitz cheerfully identifies as a recovering Hamlet. “I think what makes it addictive is the realisation that you can never hit all the points. You’ll never nail everything. So there’s this desire to do it again and to see other people’s versions – if your ego can handle it. I’ve done other roles where I’ve been far more exhausted or taxed, but Hamlet makes you feel alive in ways other plays don’t.”

Mates for three decades, Cowell, Leslie and Schmitz cut their teeth as actor-writers in the independent theatre scene in the early noughties. Each went on to play Hamlet in major productions: Cowell for Bell Shakespeare in 2008, Leslie for Melbourne Theatre Company in 2010 and Schmitz for Brisbane’s La Boite in 2010, and then again for Belvoir (directed by Simon Stone) in 2013. Schmitz also starred (with Tim Minchin) in Tom Stoppard’s Hamlet spin-off Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead for Sydney Theatre Company that same year.

While no particular production will be referenced, “part of the fun we’re having is at the expense of a certain kind of director’s theatre”, Leslie says. “One of the great things about being an actor is that you get to work with all kinds of directors but at the same time you’re also completely at their mercy, especially with a play like Hamlet. You might have an idea of how you’d like to play it, until the director says, ‘Oh yeah, the final fight scene is a dance, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern aren’t in this and I’m going to turn Horatio into Ophelia.’”

Inevitably, perhaps, Hamlet Camp is also something of a love letter to theatre. “I guess it is a bit of a reflection on the life we’ve all chosen and how we’re changed over the years,” Cowell says. “We’re like proper adults now – kids and relationships and gym memberships and stuff – and so we’re also coming to terms with the fact that our tortured young prince phase is behind us. It’s a horrible day in an actor’s life when they realise they’ll never play the Dane. But it’s also horrible when you realise, all of a sudden, that you’ll never do it again and that you’re in the running to play Claudius or Polonius.”

And you’ll always have to live with what you didn’t do. “If you’re thinking about the summit, conquering the Everest of acting, you’re missing the point,” Cowell says. “You’re going to be disappointed, because it doesn’t exist. The only thing that exists is being a storyteller, working with people you love and stirring the pot of life. That’s all there is in the end.”

Cowell hopes Hamlet Camp is a piece the trio – and others from that charmed circle of actors who have played Hamlet – can revisit in the future.

“I said to these guys we could maybe do it every five years, and if one of us isn’t available, another actor can step in, like Harriet Gordon Anderson [Bell Shakespeare’s 2022 Hamlet] or Leon Ford [Bell Shakespeare, 2002],” Cowell says. “But I love the idea of coming back to it when we’re 57, 67 or 77 … it’ll just get weirder and sadder. I can’t imagine we’ll ever be rid of Hamlet.”