Review: My Brooklyn Hamlet
The Carriageworks, Leeds
A black-and-white photo dominates the stage. It is Brenda Adelman’s father, standing in the kitchen, holding a .38 Smith & Wesson handgun. He used this gun to kill his wife. He shot her in the head. Six months later, he married her sister.
Then he went to prison for two-and-a-half years on an involuntary manslaughter plea bargain. Brenda and her brother sued him in the civil courts for their mother’s wrongful death. The court awarded them $2.2m, but dad hid his fortune so they never got a dime. Then he died. And then she forgave him.
That’s right, she forgave him.
This is Brenda Adelman’s true story. Everything so far, and plenty more, actually happened to the actress from New York, and she turned it into a one-woman, one-hour show.
To watch it unfold is gripping, emotionally draining and uplifting. Adelman recalls her father’s pride when he taught her to shoot when she was 10 – using the gun he would later use to kill her mother. She tells how she was constantly torn between her parents in a home filled with the love and hatred of a tempestuous marriage. And how the pain of childhood shaped a woman whose own relationships were based on extremes of sex and violence.
All the time there is the echo of that fatal gunshot ringing in our ears, and the knowledge that this is real, and these things really happened to the woman standing just a few feet away.
Yes, it is scripted, and yes she has performed it 1,000 times, and written a book, and set up a website and done a master’s degree in spiritual psychology. But none of that takes away from the unavoidable horror. My Brooklyn Hamlet – staged here as part of the Leeds International Performing Arts Festival before going to London – is inevitably more than a stage show. It is therapy, and truth proving itself stranger than fiction.
Adelman, brought up by her late mother with a love of Shakespeare, plays on the parallels with Hamlet – in which Claudius murders the hero’s father and marries his mother. The key difference is that while Hamlet is bent on revenge, Adelman ultimately sought to forgive her father. If any kind of remarkable twist were needed for such a story, that is it.
