Pan Pan The Rehearsal, Playing the Dane

“To be, or not to be, that is the question.”—William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Pan Pan, the leading contemporary theater ensemble from Dublin, Ireland, delighted you with their punk-rock-fueled production Oedipus Loves You a few years back. Now they return with a penetrating examination of Shakespeare's Hamlet. In Pan Pan's purgatorial presentation of the Bard’s immortal tragedy, you the audience are faced with a choice: who is going to be, or not be, Hamlet? Actors compete to play the title role, but as we enter the graveyard world of this icon of individualism, can anyone escape playing the “Great” Dane? Aren't we all acting the main part?

Pan Pan’s dramatic take on Shakespeare’s masterwork is informed by intensively researched scholarship in which Hamlet is seen as representing the limits of human consciousness; he is a man caught between the ages. He knows the old is obsolete, yet the new age has barbarian features he cannot stomach. But if he gets chosen to play the Dane, he's going to have to prepare himself for everything that follows, funeral meats and all. So, “to audition or not to audition?” But the real question is: how the hell are you going to learn all those lines? Come find out with the irrepressible Pan Pan.

The Rehearsal, Playing the Dane is programmed in conjunction with The Year of Shakespeare, which celebrates the culmination of the initial three-year partnership between The Ohio State University and the Royal Shakespeare Company and is sponsored by Ohio State's Arts Initiative as part of that partnership. Cosponsors for The Year of Shakespeare are the Wexner Center for the Arts, the School of Music, the Department of Theatre, and the Jerome Lawrence & Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute at the Ohio State University Libraries. This production also continues a series of new plays presented by the Wexner Center in which Shakespearean classics serve as launching pads for contemporary theatrical explorations.