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Hamlet: Wakefulness review – fraught and full-throated musical tragedy

Summerhall, Edinburgh
Polish company’s musical take on Shakespeare’s death-fixated drama is full of feeling, but its story never really sings

It begins with lines from Under the Earth I Go, a reflective piece about death and renewal, written as his own elegy by the Scottish poet Hamish Henderson. That serves as a suitably contemplative introduction to Shakespeare’s death-fixated play, one that begins after the poisoning of one Hamlet and ends with the slaughter of another.

Wrocław’s Song of the Goat gravitates naturally to such material. This least frivolous of companies made its name on the fringe in 2004 with Chronicles: A Lamentation, an expressive dance-theatre piece shot through with haunting polyphonic song that felt placeless and timeless.

At Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 15 August

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