My father would kill me.   We walked out of a production of Hamlet after only seven minutes.

Anne and I were really pumped to go see this production of Hamlet– Hamlet 1990.  We were excited to be doing something “cultural” with our Friday night other than going to the usual lineup of bars and clubs, or sitting around making fun of crappy 80s horror movies.  We put on our finest clothes and were giddy with excitement about seeing an avante garde remake of Shakespeare’s classic that supposedly made profound statements about the state of Chinese society post Tiananmen Square and under the rule of an authoritarian government.

But like I said, we only made it seven minutes in. As Anne pointed out on our way home, the production hit the trifecta of things that we could not sit for 2 and a half hours through.  IF it had only been two of the three problems we probably would have toughed it out– but all three made it just impossible.

Problem 1: No Subtitles:
All the advertisements for the production listed in bold letters: ENGLISH SUBTITLES.  In fact that’s what inspired us to buy the medium level tickets literally minutes after seeing the posters. However when the play began, the subtitles were not projected at all.  There were spaces on the sides of the stage that looked like where they would project the subtitles, but it just never happened.

Problem 2: Couldn’t hear/see:
We would have been ok without the subtitles since we’re familiar with the story and we had expected to be able to kind of tell what was going on.  However our seats were so far away from the stage that we couldn’t really see what was happening up there or hear the actors at all (our Chinese sucks, but we thought we could catch as catch can during this.)  The behavior of the audience made seeing what was going on or hearing it impossible (see Problem 3).

Problem 3: The audience’s behavior: Before the show, Anne and I discussed the possibility that the behavior of the audience might be pretty annoying. To avoid making generalizations about a whole nationality of people, I’ll just say that we were a bit worried about the audience’s ability to sit quietly for 3-ish hours of a play.  It turned out our fears were incredibly justified.  For the first 5 minutes of the play, people in the audience were, I’m not exaggerating here, getting up and wandering around the theatre.  Because people were wandering around, some people in the middle of the audience stood up so they could see.  This caused a wave of standing up so for the first 5 minutes, the whole audience was standing and kind of shoving each other around to get a better view.  After about five minutes people got settled and finally seats were taken.  However sitting down just kind of intensified the ongoing discussion amongst the audience.  I’ve noticed before that my students have a tendency to talk through movies.  Often just saying aloud what they see happening on the screen. “That man is fat.”  “He is driving a car very fast.” “They are going to fight.” The bits I understand from my students are always just simple declarative sentences.  Perhaps at times they make more astute observations, but the pieces I catch are always very simple “this is what I see right now” type sentences.  I’m not sure if that’s what the audience was doing, but the talking was pretty overwhelming– so much so that we really could not hear the actors.  Now perhaps there’s something to be said about really interacting with theatre and truly being a part of it by discussing it as it happens, but seeing as we couldn’t even hear the actors, I think this was pretty annoying.  So after five minutes, we decided that we just couldn’t do it.  There would be no way we could stay through two and a half hours of this mayhem, but we felt really embarassed to leave.  Whispering (we were the only ones whispering), we decided that we would leave on the 20th time someone’s cell phone rang.  It took two minutes for 20 cell phones to ring, and we were out by the seventh minute of the play– right during Hamlet’s first monologue (I think– I couldn’t hear him, but he was the only person on stage, and I think I saw his mouth moving).

So yeah, I feel deeply embarassed that I walked out of a theatre in mid-production.  And even more embarassed that I walked out on Shakespeare.  But there was just NO WAY we could sit through that. It’s very important that I mention that we didn’t walk out because of the play itself.  From what I could see of the set it looked really great– a simple, kind of frightening barber’s chair for a throne in front of a cheese cloth background that they used great lighting effects on.  Also some kind of garish ceiling fans on top (that one review said would later be used as swords?).  I mean the play itself really sounds spectacular, and I would love to see a production of it sometime under better circumstances.  I just felt really disappointed, not just because I had to walk out of a play, but because the play seemed to have so much potential.  Maybe they’ll do an international tour sometime and I can check it out somewhere else.