A Play on Hamlet
A Play on Hamlet

 

A captain appeared on the seaside. He was confused to find some of the bodies and wood debris scattered everywhere. Not long after that, a woman walked towards him. She was all in panic and confusion. The woman told him about a tragedy that happened the night before. Her ship was swept away by waves. It drowned almost everyone who was on the ship.

The captain who showed sympathy to the disaster that had happened to her and then tried to calm the girl. He informed that the girl could have worked at the rich person’s house by the name of Orsino. Alas, the captain said that it would be better if Viola, the girl’s name, disguised herself as a man.

Without any better option, Viola then took the opportunity.

That was the first scene of “The Twelfth Night” which had brought to the stage at Binus Auditorium on last Wednesday (06/17). This story appears as one of the Drama Performance’s final exam which takes the theme “Shakespearean Legacy” by English Department. Aside from The Twelfth Night, the other six semester student brought Othello, As You Like it, Hamlet and Macbeth to the same stage.

What interesting about these performances is the ability to adapt Shakespeare old drama script becomes easy to understand. Six scripts appeared with different time settings than from the original scripts. They were slightly reworked in the style of a selected language and edited in their plot scenes. Not only that, many variations of a newer generation culture mixed very well with the scripts? premises; like mafia, casino and NAZI. Those mixtures managed to create an exciting and intriguing reason to imagine further.

Othello
Othello

 

Who would have thought that Macbeth’s ambition is not to become a King of Scotland instead he pursued to become a Nazi Fuhrer? Or imagining Orlando to be a genius at playing poker in a casino rather than a great fighter Shakespeare intended him to be?

For us at the English department, Drama performance class is used as one of the learning tools for our students to improve pronunciation, clarity, speech volume and other English speaking – related fluency determiners. Besides, the opportunity to work together with their classmates for 5 months have proven to be a wonderful experience to collaborate, exchange ideas, and time management. Everybody felt that they have contributed at something they were really good at, like, writing the script, directing, making props , lighting and many others.

To make some intriguing materials from Shakespeare’s scripts has become a great achievement for English Department students themselves. Aside all of the technical preparation, there is a hope to make a better performance with better adaptation scripts from famous writer because as we are the next generation have our responsibility to take care of our culture [ Linda].