Fat Ham at The Swan Theatre review: A black, queer twist on Hamlet that shakes up Shakespeare

Shakespeare is, it’s fair to say, a divisive playwright in the 21st-century. Hailed as the greatest British writer in history, his lengthy soliloquies, verbose poetics and complex plot lines often don’t hit with modern audiences. The trend for contemporary reimagining, however, is giving archaic scripts new life. 

Enter Pulitzer winner James Ijames and the Royal Shakespeare Company with Fat Ham, a production that translates the themes of family, betrayal and revenge into the garden party of a Black, American family in southern suburbia. 

The play begins with the familiar set-up of Hamlet: a son who is told by the ghost of his father to avenge his death by killing his murderous uncle, newly wed to Hamlet’s mother. 

However, in a diverse modern society, this is made more complex: protagonist Juicy is a queer survivor rejected by his hypermasculine father, Pap (Sule Rimi). His relationship with his mother Tedra (Andi Osho) is loving but strained. Juicy doesn’t want to take on the mantel of the family home like his uncle Rev (also Rimi); a preacher who is spiritually critical of Juicy’s homosexuality. Instead, he wants to study HR and leave smalltown America to discover his tribe.

If Hamlet himself is heralded as the over-thinker trapped by his own philosophical nature, the empathetic Juicy, played with warmth and sensitivity by Big Boy’s Olisa Odele, is simply trying to make sense of himself and escape his upbringing. How does a self-declared ‘soft’ boy function in a community where men are impulsive, dominant and violent? Brief callbacks to the famous lines of Hamlet highlight the universality of the text, portraying a young man who desperately needs answers to life’s impossible questions.

If Hamlet was a tragedy, however, Fat Ham is pure comedy. The cast boast hysterical chemistry. Andi Osho’s Tedra clings to her female youth and independence; Sandra Marvin’s Rabby is a caricature of the over-the-top gospel churchgoer, and Kieran Taylor-Ford’s cousin Tio is a f*ckboy who just wants to enjoy the party. 

The power here is in Ijames’s characterisation: it is the queer cast of Juicy, childhood friend Opal (Jasmine Elcock) and soldier Larry (Corey Montague-Sholay) who are grounded, relatable and just trying to cope in a world where they cannot truly embrace themselves. Amidst picnic-blanket ghosts, cringey karaoke and a climactic game of charades, the comic sparks fly, but it is the queer beating heart that survives.

Fat Ham is playing now.