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Watch a New Virtual Reality Production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet: A Modern Take on a Classic Play | ARTLECTURE

Watch a New Virtual Reality Production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet: A Modern Take on a Classic Play

/News, Issue & Events/
by WGBH



VIEW 3422


Thy Father’s Spirit

Shakespeare’s most iconic play meets the cutting edge of immersive storytelling. Hamlet 360: Thy Father’s Spirit is a cinematic 360 experience that explores new dimensions of the medium by casting the viewer as the Ghost of Hamlet’s dead father, giving the viewer a sense of agency and urgency as an omniscient observer, guide and participant.

 In Hamlet 360: Thy Father’s Spirit, we instead get to inhabit the ghost, who only appears in the play a handful of times but still fills every scene with his glowering presence. The 60-minute VR “modern adaptation” is a co-production of Boston’s Commonwealth Shakespeare Company and Google.

“Both extremely long by the standards of virtual reality and extremely short by the standards of Hamlet,” writes Elizabeth Harris at The New York Times, the film “can be watched in 3-D using a V.R. headset or in two dimensions on a desktop or mobile device” (see it above). On a vast, darkened set cluttered with fine but shabby furnishings in heaps, glowing lamps, a bathtub, and a car, actors perform condensed scenes while we, as ghost, freely roam about, viewing the action in three dimensions, a device intended to give the viewer “a sense of agency and urgency as an omniscient observer, guide and participant,” the production notes.

The film’s creators, Harris writes, “hope that beyond the fresh experience it provides, it will also serve as a tool to bring great theater to wider audiences—and bring bigger audiences to theater.” 



Video by WGBH


All images/words © the artist(s) and organization(s)

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Commonwealth Shakespeare Company & Google Present:

Hamlet 360: Thy Father’s Spirit


Adapted & Directed by Steven Maler

Produced by Graham Sack & Quentin Little

Production & Cinematography by Sensorium

Costume & Production Design by Clint Ramos

Music & Sound Design by Bruce Odland

Technical Direction by Matthew Niederhauser & John Fitzgerald

Post Production Sound by SilVR

Visual Effects by The Molecule


Starring 

Jack Cutmore-Scott as Hamlet

Faran Tahir as Claudius

Brooke Adams as Queen Gertrude

Jacob Fishel as Horatio

Mark Torres as Polonius

Flora Diaz as Ophelia

Desean Kevin Terry as Laertes

Lee Wilkof as the Gravedigger

Scott Barrow as Player King/Gravedigger

Alex Schneps as Second Gravedigger


with

Jay O. Sanders as the Ghost


and

Anthony Rapp as Lucianus