In the darkness of UniMelb’s Union Theatre, we sat in silence, eagerly awaiting the entrance of Denmark’s palace guards. Suddenly, a bright light shone: footage projected onto the scrim of a mother giving birth. As the video progressed, eight silhouetted figures entered the stage, turning away from the auditorium to gaze at the screen. Together, we watched as a squalling, bloody baby entered the world. At first, there was jubilation; gloved hands lifted it skywards. Then, the nurses began to realise that something was wrong. Onstage, the ensemble moved, a warm glow illuminating their faces for the first time. As a nurse wrapped a measuring tape around the digital baby’s head, one cast member held an inflatable golden crown and lowered it onto Hamlet’s brow.

This production of Hamlet is unlike any we have seen before. Touring with Peruvian theatre company Teatro La Plaza, eight actors with Down syndrome perform Chela De Ferrari’s Spanish adaptation of Shakespeare’s work, while English subtitles play at the top of the scrim. In just 90 minutes, the Shakespearean classic is transformed from a Danish prince’s angsty tragedy into a joyous celebration of neurodivergence, theatre and community. Like many others before it, Ferrari’s Hamlet sits in conversation with its predecessors. Unlike other productions, however, this play interrogates neurologically normative assumptions about who is allowed to play Hamlet, deliberately altering a canonical text in order to invite post-normal interpretative possibilities.

Nothing about this performance was ‘normal’. Its narrative was fragmented into episodes so that snatches of Shakespeare’s text sat amongst meta-theatrical recreations of the rehearsal process, musical sequences and cast interviews. The lived experience of the cast sat at the heart of the work. Fifteen minutes in, they stood in a line downstage to answer questions about their theatrical experience, their perspective on Down Syndrome, and certain physiological differences that influenced the way they performed. Actor Octavio Bernaza explained that it can take him time to speak, assuring the audience that we didn’t need to worry, we could simply relax while we waited for his lines. Cristina León Barandiarán acted as a quasi-narrator. She directly addressed the audience to explain different facets of the production, and questioned the actors in extensive interviews about their personal lives. Through these ruptures, Ferrari challenged our expectations and made space for atypical theatrical approaches by ‘atypical’ individuals. The production was fundamentally neurodivergent, not simply because it had a solely neurodivergent cast, but because it experimented with new modes of communication in order to challenge neurotypical ideas about how theatre should work.

This was an especially effective approach when applied to Hamlet because of the play’s impressive canonical status. Over time, prominent scholars, practitioners and actors have venerated Shakespeare’s work to the extent that the playwright occupies an almost godly status in popular imagination. By approaching Hamlet as a malleable work, and indeed by dramatising their own personal experiences of the adaptive process, the Teatro La Plaza practitioners challenged such cultural constraints. When approaching the well-known monologue, “to be or not to be,” actor Jaime Cruz accepted a fake Skype call from renowned actor Sir Ian McKellen. “You speak very good Spanish” Jaime told him, to bright laughter from the audience. As we watched the recording, clumsily dubbed with a Spanish voiceover, we felt like co-conspirators in the joke; although McKellen didn’t know it, a large auditorium of spectators were laughing at him. Here, his cultural authority as a renowned Shakespearean performer was subtly undermined. As we laughed, we subordinated McKellen to Cruz’s onstage presence, thus eroding the cultural forces that typically delineate ‘proper’ Hamlets from ‘invalid’ ones. In that moment, the ‘atypically’ embodied performer became the most natural casting choice. When Ferrari’s Hamlet self-reflexively enacted the theatre-making process, therefore, we were able to imagine the function of theatre as a communicative tool for everyone, not just the neurological majority.

The best part of this production is definitely the level of audience participation that was incorporated into the play. Alongside the brilliant actors on stage, we as the audience felt like the ninth member of the performance, playing the role of the general public who perceive, influence, and even disable neurodivergent people in their everyday lives. When Hamlet rejected Ophelia and told her to “get thee to a nunnery”, a cameraman followed them as they went backstage. The audience were forced to listen in on their private conversation, until Hamlet spotted the eavesdropping cameraman and stopped the recording. We were suddenly confronted with our role as invasive viewers, and there was nothing we could do about it. Like Gertrude, Polonius and the able-bodied public, we were intruding and meddling with the private lives of people with Down Syndrome by making them into a spectacle and casting our judgements onto them.

In other instances, audience participation was lighthearted and fun. As Hamlet staged his play within the play, members of the audience were invited onstage to take on the roles of Tree Number One, Tree Number Two and The Moon to “see how the neurotypicals do it”. The actors then say that they were doing it “wrongly”, before asking the audience members to reenact their neurodivergent version of the scene. The show came to a peak when the performers invited all of us to dance on stage with them at the end of the curtain call. As the stage turned into a dance floor, and people laughed and moved their bodies together in jubilant celebration, Hamlet fulfilled its potential as a project celebrating diverse stories and the power of community.

RISING’s Hamlet is a reminder of how powerful theatre is as a medium for connection and storytelling. As the play progressed, each actor was given the space to shine and tell their own stories. The show seamlessly moved through tonal shifts between scenes, variously evoking pathos, discomfort and delight, thereby allowing us to experience eight extraordinary and multi-faceted stories in all their complexity. The hardships and frustrations of living in a society that is patronising and unaccommodating was captured alongside a joyous celebration of people with Down Syndrome, challenging the audience’s assumptions and empowering the cast by spotlighting the stories that they wanted to tell. This is undoubtedly the most joyous production of Hamlet we have ever seen, and everyone walked out of the theatre having experienced a togetherness that transcended both language and neurotype.