HAMLET, DRAMA STUDIO, WILTSHIRE COLLEGE, SALISBURY CAMPUS

BE warned – the performance has elements of surprise and fear and acts of violence. That’s some welcome as a pre-performance warning prior to Wednesday’s promenade production of Hamlet.

Produced by students on the BTEC National Diploma in Performing Arts at the end of their course, this was a reworking of Hamlet into a neat one hour and ten minutes, a sort of potted Shakespeare.

And it worked, leaving many memorable moments indelible in my mind.

Guides dressed as robots ensured the audience knew where to stand as we moved through scenes in semi-darkness with simple white sheeting used as screening to create small intimate spaces, opening out for the final, quite amazing, fight scene.

All the famous bits of Hamlet were there, yet it never felt rushed or contrived. For the play within a play scene, the students had donned costumes and filmed themselves in Churchill Gardens and both cast and audience watched on as one.

But it is the fight scene that will linger in my mind. Mark Stevens, who played Laertes, unfortunately injured his ankle in rehearsal for this scene. Martial arts exponent Dean Ridge, who choreographed the fight scene, stepped in as Laertes’ bodyguard and champion, to fight Hamlet (played by Jamie Layton Jones the day I went), and what a fight. I’ve not seen the Bourne Identity, which programme leader Dylan Thomas told me was the inspiration for this style of fighting, but it was actually quite frightening. What a coup for student theatre.

Congratulations must go to all the students who took part, and to Dylan Thomas, and I look forward to next year’s production with bated breath.

Anne Morris