JP Newsletter Mar 2018 Landscape

Volume 23 Issue 1 March 2018
Poor Yorick
2nd to 7th July 2018
Poor Yorick was a winning entry in a competition run as part of the Royal Shakespeare
Company’s Open Stages project and was performed at both the 400-seat Dolman Theatre
and Blackwood Little Theatre in Wales. The play has a cast of five – Yorick the jester, his
tavern wench girlfriend Bess, Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, his mother, Gertrude, and the
ghost of his late father.
Based on characters created by William Shakespeare for his play Hamlet, this is the version
of events the Bard would have written if he’d been in a more upbeat mood. In
Shakespeare’s play, Yorick the court jester is dead. But here, he’s out on the road - dying a
death - as he pioneers a new kind of comedy called stand-up. He’s fed up of the old
knockabout routines and wants to do observational comedy in which he tackles subjects
like the Black Death, dung heaps and leeches. Sadly, the world is not ready for this kind of
humour and a dejected Yorick is persuaded by good-time girl Bess – a tart with a heart of
gold - to return to the king’s castle at Elsinore and get his old job back (it’s either that or
she goes back to her job at the brothel).
But when Yorick arrives he finds there have been many changes. Hamlet – always a crazy
mixed-up prince - is moping around like a love-struck teenager, constantly being nagged
at by his overbearing Jewish mother Gertrude who wants him to get himself a nice
girlfriend. Hamlet offers to give Yorick his old job back – but only if he helps him in his
plans to avenge the death of his father (whose ghostly figure pops in from time to time to
show off his new skills as an apparition). As Yorick says, “What could possibly go wrong?”
We are holding a read-through on Wednesday March 7th in the Studio at 7.30pm. This
is a fun play that will hopefully be a lot of fun to stage and perform. We hope to see Jávea
Players’ finest at the auditions on Sunday March 11th at 11am.
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