Blind Hamlet

When you think about it, Hamlet kills his stepfather on nothing more than a hunch. An adverse reaction to a short play isn’t conclusive proof of anything at all. If it was, I’d be serving several life sentences.

Like Hamlet, Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour wants to put his audience on trial by theatre. His voice emerges from a dictaphone on an empty stage. A microphone leans in and amplifies his words – words he spoke some time ago, in Moscow, while losing his sight.

His text contains instructions for today’s audience and, one by one, seven of us take to the stage. Soleimanpour guides them, very slowly, towards a game of Mafia. Everyone closes their eyes, while two "murderers" pick a victim. After each round, the group selects a suspect to execute, based on suspicion alone. Will they pick out the guilty parties or will the killers get away with their crimes?

All of which is watchable enough, if initially perplexing, but it ends abruptly without having said anything of much substance. "Maybe don’t base your judicial system on a hunch" – that’s about it. There’s a nod to Iran, but nothing particular.

You get the sense that director Ramin Gray and the Actors Touring Company were aiming for something more than this. A whole swirl of ideas—on blindness, being and not being, communication after death and the nature of theatre itself—swim vaguely through the piece, without ever coming together into a coherent or concrete whole. Novelty and poetry maintain your interest, but Blind Hamlet needs more matter with less art.