Photos: Pate Pesonius

Prinsessa Hamlet

Q-teatteri 2017

Direction: Linda Wallgren
Written by: E.L. Karhu

Lights: Anniina Veijalainen
Set Design: Ina Saarinen
Costumes: Annika Saloranta

The story is about a princess that has to fulfill her role as a new ruler of the kingdom. However she is depressed and doesn’t care about that but there is a strong struggle to avoid the expectations of others. In the end, it is all about ever ending cosmic repetition, over and over again.   I ended up using a lot of arpeggios to strengthen the feeling of eternal repetition. And as Ina was doing her set design about a staircase in the middle, the climbing arpeggios seemed even more accurate.

The text that E.L. Karhu has written is very fast with a lot of cuts – as she calls the text itself a “comic play”. For example, the scene can change couple of times on one written script page. We wanted to make these cuts with lights and sound and in my perspective it had to be a tiny sound but still aggressive. I ended up using a short glitch noise sound which seemed to work very well and direct the focus of the spectator. The challenge was that it became a little annoying after a while so I had to reduce the amount of those cut-sounds anyway.

I ended up through-composing the play as the tension seemed to lose its grip with silent parts. That was a bit of a challenge as there were so many scenes and changes. (We had some trouble with the mixer console as it had only 100 scene slots so we had to use external software to control the mixer!)

On stage:
Lotta Kaihua, Hannu Kivioja, Leea Klemola, Elena Leeve, Emmi Parviainen ja Eero Ritala