ajhlovestheatre

FAT HAM

by James Ijames

directed by Sideeq Heard for the Royal Shakespeare Company 

original direction by Saheem Ali

Swan Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon – until 13 September 2025

running time: 100 minutes no interval 

https://www.rsc.org.uk/fat-ham

Arguably Shakespeare’s most popular tragedy, Hamlet gets a modern Black American makeover in James Ijames’s rollicking, Pulitzer-winning 2022 Fat Ham. It now receives its UK premiere at (where else?!) the RSC in a production based on, but subtly and surprisingly different to, the one that played at New York’s Public Theater then on Broadway where it was a Best Play Tony nominee. Ijames transplants the story to contemporary North Carolina and the Danish royals are now a squabbling family looking to possibly sell their barbecue restaurant to alleviate their financial woes, and Elsinore is their back porch. 

Shakespeare’s “sweet prince” is now Juicy (Olisa Odele), a likeable, thicc, troubled queer college student trying to find the strength in his own softness and struggling to break the family cycle of macho bullshit and bullying. Gertrude is now brash glamazon Tedra (“I need noise. Commotion makes me happy”), played with go-for-broke joy but real heart by Andi Osho, torn between her sensitive son and volatile new husband (Sule Rimi, proving that comical and terrifying are not mutually exclusive) but determined to have as good a time as possible. An unexpected bonus of Ijames’s writing is that he actually gives Tedra more agency, or at least more justification for her actions, than Shakespeare afforded Gertrude. When Juicy quizzes her as to whether she misses his father (depicted as a far more savage figure here than anything envisioned for Hamlet), she responds that “my memory of him won’t allow me to miss him….if you think about something everyday…you not really remembering it. It’s just there. Like heartburn.” She further notes “I went from my Daddy’s house to my husband’s house. I ain’t never been alone.” Her behaviour is sometimes crass but it is fundamentally understandable and Osho makes every aspect of her ring true.

Anybody familiar with the Shakespeare (or “that dead old white man” as he’s described by one of the characters) will get a kick out of seeing the way Ijames’s script dovetails with the original: Horatio is cheerful stoner Tio (Kieran Taylor-Ford, fabulous), perpetually lusting after Tedra, and Ophelia becomes hard-nosed, fledgling lesbian Opal, played with a seething, inspired mix of weirdness and awkwardness by Jasmine Elcock. The play-within-a-play that unseats the new King becomes here a karaoke party (Juicy/Hamlet expresses his ongoing unease with a roof-raising karaoke version of Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ while Tedra launches into an eye-poppingly suggestive rendition of the Crystal Waters dancefloor classic ‘100% Pure Love’ aimed at her new hubby) and a game of charades. Ijames has a tremendous gift for heightened dialogue rooted in real life, and Fat Ham is raucously funny but never quite loses sight of the truth beneath all the outrage and volume.

Director Sideeq Heard, who was associate director to Saheem Ali on the original production, matches the text with a staging that is flashy and slightly surreal. If he still can’t solve the problem that the writer can’t quite seem to decide how to end the play, the slight lag in focus and tension about seventy five per cent of the way through that marred the New York version is no longer evident here. Undoubtedly inspired by the Swan’s apron stage, Heard and Ijames have amped up the direct connection with the audience in comparison to the original. The fourth wall isn’t so much ignored as gleefully demolished, giving the show the occasional impression of being an American panto for adults, and I don’t mean that as a criticism.

Fat Ham UK also feels like more of a team effort than the NYC original. Where the Broadway production was dominated by the exquisite melancholy of Marcel Spears and a barnstorming performance by Tony nominee Nikki Crawford as Tedra, this superb ensemble all carry equal weight. Odele doesn’t have the vulnerability of his predecessor but makes true and vivid Juicy’s self-effacing intelligence and his frequent disbelief at the behaviour of those around him. 

Sandra Marvin delivers an irresistible comic tour de force as opinionated family friend Rabby: think Polonius reimagined as a church lady, a human hurricane in a flurry of purple and sequins. She’s a Jesus-obsessed delight and the late revelation about her character, while still far fetched, makes more sense than it did in the previous staging. Another improvement is Corey Montague-Sholay, who makes something really touching out of her son, an uptight Marine hiding a couple of secrets of his own and who gets a bizarre but crowd-pleasing conclusion.

Fat Ham may be more spangles than subtlety, and uses a number of well-worn tropes to hit the comedy home, but it compounds it’s clichés with aplomb and a vitiating showbiz flair, and you are pretty much guaranteed to leave the theatre feeling a hell of a lot better than you did when you went in. It also has a robust intelligence underneath all the shouting and bawling. Maruti Evans’s house-porch set looks realistic at first, but becoming more and more artificial the longer you scrutinise it, and appears a useful metaphor for Fat Ham’s relationship to Hamlet. Dominique Fawn Hill’s costumes and Bradley King’s lighting are suitably flamboyant and Skylar Fox’s illusions add a layer of authentic magic. 

You might have thought that Hamlet is the last of Shakespeare’s plays that could bear a high camp, high energy treatment (I mean, even Lear has a Fool), but you’d have thought wrong. This is a great time in the theatre, and has transferred over here way better than I would have expected. Another popular hit for the RSC.