Arts

Fat Ham reimagines the Danish prince at a Southern family barbecue, and gives the play a comic twist – and a happy ending

Just wait for the line, “Ay, there’s the rub.” In Fat Ham, James Ijames’s Pulitzer prize-winning play, which opens this week in Stratford-upon-Avon, the famous line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet is delivered in a way the Bard could never have imagined.

The play is set at a modern-day, raucously incident-filled black family barbecue in North Carolina. But while borrowing cleverly from Hamlet, Fat Ham is not a contemporary retelling. In its 95-minute high-energy collision of comedy and drama, Ijames (pronounced “Imes”) has transformed the work from a Shakespearean tragedy into a play that celebrates a queer young man’s identity, complete with charged confrontations, revelations and a rousing denouement that is most definitely not in the original.

When Fat Ham opened in New York in 2022, the critics lavished it with praise and audiences applauded loudly alongside them – first in an off-Broadway coproduction by the National Black Theatre and New York City’s Public Theater, and then at its Broadway transfer.

Bringing it to England will be a whole new adventure, ljames says. The 44-year-old recently moved to New York to become an associate professor of theatre at Columbia University, and is travelling to Stratford-upon-Avon to see the UK production.

“The most surreal part of this is to do Fat Ham where Shakespeare is from,” he says. “It’s next level. I love Shakespeare, and feel almost as if he’s saying, ‘Yeah, I like what you did. He took stories the audience would know and made something uniquely contemporary with them. That’s what I’m trying to do with my play.”

Fat Ham is set not in the Danish court of yore, but at the Southern backyard celebration that follows the wedding of Tedra (Andi Osho), who’s Gertrude-adjacent, and her dead husband’s brother, Rev (Sule Rimi), a kind of Claudius.

Meanwhile, the Hamlet-ish central character of Juicy (Olisa Odele) is struggling to be out and express himself.

Echoing the original plot, Tedra’s dead husband (also played by Rimi), returns to chivvy and torment his son, Juicy, encouraging him to murder the man who has supplanted him. At the same time, the characters are aware of the theatre audience watching them, a device that heightens the intimacy of the play.

Ijames’s first experience of Shakespeare was reading Julius Caesar in high school in Bessemer City, North Carolina – “A play I still love deeply, particularly the female characters”. He read Hamlet when he was performing in an undergraduate production at college in Atlanta, Georgia. “It’s a family drama at its core, so it was very easy to make it about a family that looked and sounded like mine. I wanted to keep the bolts of the plot, but not end with the same tragedy.”

He stresses that his “pretty prudish, very religious, loving, always supportive and wonderful” parents are not mirrored by the characters on stage, “but the rhythms and cadences of their speech are the same”.

Of the themes at the heart of the show, ljames says: “It’s me. I’m black and queer, and that shows up in most things I write. I also wanted to explore the gaps between generations. In the original play and mine, the older generations want to continue cycles of violence, and in the original, the younger generations succumb to the same feelings pretty early on. But in Fat Ham, I wanted the characters to survive.”

The director Sideeq Heard says the key to the play is finding a way to make the family theme resonate with audiences, as well as creating “the crossover between Southern culture and Shakespeare”. Fat Ham is also, he says, about liberation and identity. “The play suggests we can ultimately reject violence and do something different — be stronger together.”

More than a decade ago, while a student at the British American Drama Academy, Heard, now 31, was standing outside the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon and saying to himself, “I want to work here one day.” He laughs.

“Fast forward, and I’m here doing this play. It’s mind-blowing. Fat Ham is radical and timely, and it’s great that the RSC is boldly pushing in a new direction.

“To be able to work with a black cast and team, living 100 per cent of who I am every day – young, black, queer, urban, expressive — is great.”

With the UK production – which has an all-British cast who are using “a general American accent” – Heard says he is trying to find a balance between American and British comedy; the latter’s innate irony is a natural fit with Ijames’s sardonic sense of humour. Meanwhile, some British-American pronunciation differences — a word such as “charade” spoken as “char-ahde” rather than “shher-aid” – are played for laughs.

When he wrote Fat Ham, Ijames says, he had set himself “an internal mandate to write happy endings. I felt the world needed that, and I still think the world needs that.” So the play does not end in a riot of deaths.

Winning a Pulitzer for the play changed his life, Ijames adds. “It instantly makes you more visible. On a deeper, personal level, it made me more confident. To get rewarded for being ambitious, cheeky, and naughty was a good affirmation of my instincts.”
Heard says he has drawn a similar strength from working on the play. “I would say to anybody: Stay true to your identity. My life echoes the lives and experiences of the characters in the play.”

This month, Saturday Church, a new musical about young LGBT people, featuring three trans female characters, and for which Ijames has written a book, opens off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop. The singer-songwriter Sia (Chandelier) has written the music and lyrics.

Next spring, Ijames’s new play, Wilderness Generation, a work the playwright describes as “my version of The Big Chill, except they’re all cousins and black”, opens in Philadelphia. “I wanted to look at the various post-civil rights generations – Gen X, millennials, Gen Z.”

Ijames says he feels a responsibility to the minority groups feeling under sustained attack from the second Trump administration. “Writing is an act of resistance,” he explains. “I have to write things that speak truth to power and be a little or a lot transgressive.

“I have some privilege, and it feels like a time to be bold, not timid. The antidote to all that is going on right now is community. There is a political movement that wants us to feel isolated – alone and afraid of each other. Theatre is a really powerful way to bring people together.”

Fat Ham is at the RSC Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, to Sep 13