Ophelia

Sypnosis

"Veritable marvels from Malaysia (and familiar faces in our local theatre scene), Jo Kukathas and Thomas Pang were completely arresting: The former, who played the older Ophelia, was almost childlike in her sheer, wonderful abandon, while young Pang as Hamlet was always in razor-edge control of everything from his gravitas-laden voice to the angle of each finger, and whether he was executing a waltz, fighting invisible opponents or staggering around following his father’s ghost (portrayed rather effectively by an upside-down mop).

In Ophelia, Hamlet is an auteur, guiding his actor Ophelia to be the best version she could be. With her straight-talking and eyelash-fluttering kookiness, Kukathas’ gloriously counter-intuitive Ophelia was a fun foil to her haunted, controlling prince, who wants a beautiful-but-helpless feminine ideal that will be suitably impressed by his own epic emotions." TODAY, 21.03.2016

In collaboration with Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay

She captures the imagination with her madness, her drowning. A tragic character set eternally in a pool of water, eyes dead, and full of secrets. So little is known about Ophelia. What does she tell us beyond the limits she faced in her short life?

Inspired by Shakespeare’s character, this work delves into the workings of a mind, intricate and complex, encompassing too the landscape of a soul inextricably linked to that of a prominent other, Hamlet.

Beyond the politics of sex and gender and the cycles of oppression that pervade history, Ophelia reflects too on the grey areas of our humanity; the deep-seated desires, motives and actions that account for the tragedies that keep the human race in a constant state of drowning.