Class stages Hamlet with twist

There is something afoul in the state of Denmark — partly from the guards’ ration of beans.

The Diamond Willow Middle School Extreme Drama Class performed Shakespeare with a twist.

“I rewrote it with some help from Shakespeare. The Bard is fun but difficult for middle school, so I cut it down and hammed it up,” said drama teacher Kevin Ferguson.

Not to be a spoiler alert, but as Hamlet is a tragedy, the leads die as Shakespeare intended, but did so in a funny manner in Ferguson’s update.

The cast used a minimal set and props for the play.

In a reverse twist of tradition of theatre where teenaged boys played the women’s roles, here Hamlet was a girl.

“It was kind of awkward dying, but the play was still really fun,” Hailey Boser, 14, who played Hamlet.

“It was really fun being behind scenes with friends and Yorick raised me so he was almost like a father to me,” said Boser.

She and the other cast members had fun learning fancy Elizabethan grammar and wrapping their tongues around phrases like ‘thou dost’ and ‘say it is thine’.

“Once I was in costume, it was easier to talk like Hamlet,” Boser said.

Part of the twist was in comic relief with a real estate agent selling Hamlet’s castle to a couple who were lost and confused by the high tension, murders and drama happening around them.

Courtney Chesterman, 13, played the part of Harry, the gentleman interested in buying the castle.

“I had a really flexible part and we could improvise while we were walking around the castle,” she said.

In the final moments of the play, Chesterman had to step over the dying Prince Hamlet.

“It was worse when I tripped over people backstage and spilled the dye that was the fake poison on my hands, am I going to die?” said Chesterman dramatically.

For Darcy Hoogers, who played a spoof of the villainous King Claudius, the stage movement took a little more practice.

“It was hard to use body language and talk at the same time,” said Hoogers.

He faked it well as a good actor will and delivered deadpan humour quite well.

“I had to figure out what people would laugh at, but being a king who had anger management problems was fun,” said Hoogers.

The 21-person cast enjoyed the weekly five hours of practice over the past three months for the production, and Ferguson was proud of them.

“I had a good crop of actors who learned their lines. I only had to teach them the inflections on words and phrases, always asking them, “Why are you saying this?” in practice,” said Ferguson.

The actors performed for classmates during school hours and during the evening for friends and families Dec. 5 to 7.