Watch a New Virtual Reality Production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet: A Modern Take on a Classic Play
/News, Issue & Events/
by WGBH
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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
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