Review: HOTEL ELSINORE, Riverside Studios

The grieving family of a prominent Shakespearean actor gathers at the location where he was due to perform before his sudden demise. The late Henry Elder, however, wasn’t willing to let anything get between him and the celebrations for his career-defining one-man show. Hamlet at the Elsinore Shakespeare Festival (a yearly event that really takes place in the Danish town of Helsingør - aka Elsinore in English) has to go on with or without him. Locked in a hotel room in the middle of the night, the Elders rehearse.

Performed by a real-life family of actors (Susanna Hamnett, Joshua MacGregor, Lily MacGregor), Hotel Elsinore is a quirky experiment that doesn’t quite land. It comes off as a way to stage their own abridged and stylised version of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy rather than present a compelling original story that embraces it. 

The trio is an assortment of incertitude. The mother, a Moira Rose straight from Temu, is a neurotic narcissist who sees her husband’s death as her long-desired opportunity to play Gertrude. Her children are unimpressed and scarred by life. Henry Jr. intercedes with her initially uncooperative sister Olivia to appease her. Though the patriarch has died, there doesn’t seem to be much hurt going around at all. Such a huge plot point is barely acknowledged once the framing for the metadrama has been settled. The list of vibrant dramatic themes is just out of sight throughout. 

The occasional overacting and caricatural takes dissipate slightly when the company locks down and presents their three-hander Hamlet. Hamnett gives a threatening, convincing Polonius and Joshua MacGregor is an affable Hamlet, but it’s Lily MacGregor who undergoes the most exciting transformation, becoming a delicate, heartbreaking Ophelia. The rest of the production is unfortunately neglectable. It could have been a chance to explore generational trauma through a change in artistic sensibility, but any sort of study is difficult to pull off with a nonexistent character arc. The hints at the mother’s drinking are spun into weird comic moments until her daughter briefly breaks the pretence to offload and call her out on it, then are forgotten again. We wish there had been more of that.

The tonal ambiguity doesn’t help either. Vanity and obsession imbue the Elders’ creative tensions, but don’t take hold of an inquiry into human nature or any other tangible investigation, once more twisted into campy attempts at diversion. Regrettably, it all means very little in this shape. As it is, the piece is indulgent and self-referential, and not in a good way.

By the time the action properly kicks in, the characters haven’t been established strongly enough for the audience to care about their plight, so the allusions between Shakespeare’s work and their experience are thin, banal, and derivative. The concept is there, and it’s a strong one. It only needs a tad more emotional verisimilitude and insight to concretise successfully.