Piercing the Veil: Metatheatrical Utterances in the Stratford Festival’s 2022 Hamlet

Abstract

This article uses the Stratford Festival’s 2022 production of Hamlet, directed by Peter Pasyk and starring Amaka Umeh, to examine the performance conditions which shaped the play’s metatheatrical speech acts and subsequent audience responses. Building on J.L. Austin’s theory of speech acts and recent work by Stephen Purcell on Shakespearean metatheatricality, this article demonstrates spontaneous audience responses within the Stratford Hamlet as essential to the co-creation of the performance. This performance analysis also proposes new theoretical language for how metatheatrical speech acts provoke responses in a thrust-stage performance space such as Stratford’s Festival Theatre.