Co-written by Brendan Cowell, Ewen Leslie, and Toby Schmitz, Hamlet Camp premiered in 2025 and draws on each performer’s long and storied relationship with Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy.
All three actors have played Hamlet in major productions, and the show emerges as a kind of post-Hamlet reckoning – part memoir, part poetry reciting, part theatrical experiment.
It also reflects a broader contemporary trend of artists interrogating classical texts through personal storytelling, collapsing the distance between performer and role.
Rather than retelling Shakespeare’s plot, the piece offers fragments: original poems performed by the cast. These include Storage by Cowell, Ship to Shore by Leslie, and Skip Retail Therapy by Schmitz.
These texts orbit around grief, masculinity, regret, and ageing. They are vulnerable without being indulgent and playful without undercutting the emotional stakes.
As a creative, I loved how three artists allowed themselves to be seen not as icons of Australian theatre, but as men still wrestling with loss, longing and the stories they tell themselves to survive. I left feeling reflective, exhilarated, and quietly moved.
As performers, Cowell, Leslie and Schmitz bring sharply distinct energies. Cowell’s writing and delivery feel muscular and emotionally direct, often landing with surprising tenderness.
Leslie brings a poetic restraint, allowing silence and breath to do as much work as language. Schmitz leans into humour and self-awareness, skilfully pivoting between wit and vulnerability. Together, they form a beautifully balanced trio, never competing for focus, always listening.
Claudia Haines-Cappeau, as both producer and performer, grounds the work structurally and physically. She pops up twice throughout the show and both times leaves a mark.
In particular, the Ophelia dance piece, which she choreographed and performs, acts as a bridge between the men’s emotional spoken poetry and their bombastic skit, Hamlet Camp.
It is her movement that cuts through the structure with visceral clarity, offering a bodily counterpoint to the men’s verbal introspection and restoring Ophelia’s presence as something more than metaphor.
Steve Francis’s original music and sound design work nicely within the dreamscape of the show, supporting the performers, breathing with the text.
Jimi Rawlings’ lighting design is restrained but precise, sculpting space and mood with elegant simplicity, while Blazey Best’s voice-over work adds a hilarious and hauntingly disembodied texture that deepens the show’s dreamlike quality.
Hamlet Camp is less about Shakespeare and more about what remains after Shakespeare. It is, quite simply, a tender and funny meditation on memory, masculinity and the stories we carry. Audiences of all ages will bear witness to a fabulous comedy about Shakespeare’s (arguably) most well-known tragedy.
Hamlet Camp is presented by MODERN CONVICTS and Carriageworks and runs to 25 January. Bay 20, Carriageworks, 245 Wilson Street Eveleigh NSW 2015.
Tickets are on sale now!
Website: https://carriageworks.com.au/events/hamlet-camp-2026/
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/carriageworks/
Photo credits: Daniel Boud
