Ophelia Thinks Harder

There’s a moment early on in wit incorporated’s production of Ophelia Thinks Harder – Jean Betts’s 1993 feminist play reworking Shakespeare’s infamous Hamlet – where you realise that you should forget everything you know about Hamlet.

It’s Act 1, Scene 1: Ophelia is in her bedroom with her maid, who is attempting to help orient Ophelia (Sarah Clarke), presently unmoored by her unambitious future, to her destiny. Enter Hamlet (Leigh Scully) as Ophelia’s supposed destiny and purpose. ‘Sexy Boy’ plays loudly (surely a great wink to its prominent use in another Shakespeare adaptation, 10 Things I Hate About You), its evocative intro soaring as he prances onto the stage, Ophelia watching his approach, enraptured.

Betts’s play, wonderfully directed by Belinda Campbell (one of wit incorporated’s founding members), is rather like a call and response to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Where Hamlet focused its plot on its titular character and his ultimate folly in mistakenly killing Ophelia’s father Polonius, Ophelia Thinks Harder focuses all its attention on its titular character Ophelia, who, while relegated to Hamlet’s “love interest” in his play, is made whole in her quest for well-roundedness in her own.

What the play does so well is begin with Ophelia’s dogged quest for love, and meaning in her life, while addressing her flimsy role and purpose in Hamlet, and, ultimately, subverting audience expectation of where her story will go. Hamlet, in his first scene, declares his love for her, only to then question the purity of his love for her because of his superficial misgivings about her appearance. This naturally throws Ophelia into a state of confusion, as, believing she, too, is in love with Hamlet, can’t understand why he treats her so cruelly and with such diffidence. It is here, in attempting to unpack the dichotomy of Hamlet’s so-called affections that Ophelia first begins to question the status quo.

Subsequently Ophelia begins to thwart each character’s attempt to entwine her with the fate of the original Ophelia of Hamlet. She refuses Hamlet as her escort to the queen’s wedding, wounding his pride, and causing him to reject her completely, sending her temporarily mad, where she embarks on a days-long fast of neither eating nor sleeping.

Ophelia begins to revive, however, when she slowly begins to realise that her world – or, rather, Hamlet’s world – has been designed for her subjugation. In an ingenious twist, Betts’s play smuggles in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from the original Hamlet to be Ophelia’s learned guides into modern feminism, and who are later revealed to be women dressed as men, masquerading as such in order to attend university and become educated. It is true that, even within the aspirational text of Ophelia Thinks Harder, it is still very much a patriarchal and monarchical society, and Ophelia must think laterally and carefully about the ways in which she can get ahead without ultimately submitting to what is expected of her. After all, none of the other characters borrowed from Hamlet will listen to reason; in Ophelia Thinks Harder, it is everyone else who has gone mad, rather than its titular Ophelia.

Sarah Clarke as Ophelia and the ensemble cast do a wonderful job of portraying the folly of their characters, particularly Leigh Scully as Hamlet and Jennifer Piper as Queen Gertrude, the latter of whom frequently engaged with the lively audience with a knowing wink. For fans of Shakespeare and the original Hamlet, it’s a must see; and for everyone else, you should think hard about attending.  

Ophelia Thinks Harder
Bluestone Church Arts Space, 8A Hyde Street, Footscray
Till Saturday, 24 November 2018
witinc.com.au/whats-on/ophelia-thinks-harder