MARCH '17

PROJECT 04

Hamlet In The Golden Vale

FEATURE FILM, 360 VR PIECE, IMMERSIVE SHOW

BROOKLYN, NY

THE EXPERIMENT
To approach a story from various angles, creating and documenting the same core material using different mediums.

THE BRIEF

RTB brought Shakespeare’s Hamlet to a 500 year old Tudor-style castle in the Irish countryside, leveraging 3 unique storytelling mediums – Feature Film, 360 Virtual Reality, and Immersive Theater. The cast and crew lived in the castle while shooting the feature, staging a fully immersive performance in the 7-story castle and surrounding acreage, and collaborating with The National Theatre of Great Britain on an accompanying 6-minute VR piece.

The idea was to build a complete universe of Hamlet, with answers to any question during the entirety of the text. In between Shakespeare’s staged scenes, interim scenes were discovered through textual clues and built by extrapolating interstitial plot development. Whether audiences traveled the castle steps to discover the story in person, sat in a theater to witness the feature film, or donned a VR headset to explore the realm of Hamlet’s nightmares, the location, performers, and characters remained the same, each version offering its own way into our “story universe”. Eschewing the 2-dimensional story that takes place on a proscenium stage, we created a 3-dimensional story for audiences to reckon with from various angles. Taking audience agency a step further, participants choose not only how to engage with the story, they choose the very medium itself.

Our unique framing device (the meta-story of a troupe of actors arriving at this castle to live, breathe, and tell this story) captured the intense blend of personal and character experience, making for a radical experiment in interdisciplinary performance art and immersive storytelling.