"Dave, come on": Indigenous Identities and Language Play in Yves Sioui Durand’s Hamlet-le-Malécite

• Main Author: Lacombe, Michèle
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: University of New Brunswick 2010
• Subjects: First Nations
• Online Access: https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/SCL/article/view/18322

Hamlet-le-Malécite, written by the Huron-Wendat playwright Yves Sioui Durand in collaboration with Jean-Frédéric Messier, is a re-imagined version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet featuring First Nations characters. Primarily interested in foregrounding power relations rather than illustrating “universal” themes, the play dramatizes the process of decolonization, including the necessity of breaking silences and confronting past and current injustices, through a hybrid approach that incorporates parody and irony. Sioui Durand employs multiple languages and code switching as a way to challenge assumptions about contemporary Aboriginal people. What results is a complicated dance between a Western theatrical world, in which Hamlet’s relevance to contemporary Indigenous politics is evident, and an Indigenous theatrical world, in which its relevance to contemporary Indigenous art forms is challenged as much as it is affirmed. Hamlet-le-Malécite simultaneously appropriates, parodies, and sets aside Shakespeare in a new form of Native literature.