Ham review: vegan Hamlet takes on meat industry
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- Mary Higgins and Ell Potter premiered 'Ham,' a vegan activist reimagining of Shakespeare's Hamlet that transposes the prince's existential crisis onto the meat industry's planetary impact.
- Higgins plays a stubborn, sauntering prince seeking vengeance for the ghost of a slaughtered pig, while Potter — nicknamed 'the sausage queen' by their dad — doubles as the seductive pig-ghost and Gertrude.
- The production deploys naked dancing, a pet funeral, and a dom/sub dynamic with a meat-eating audience member as confrontational tactics aimed at the spectator's own complicity.
- Higgins explicitly frames the show as about 'the suicide of the human race' rather than animal murder — though the performers still flash 'brutal, scarring images' of animal killings on stage.
- Potter's carnivore enthusiasm prevents the piece from being 'purely haranguing,' the review notes, turning the vegan pitch into a genuine personal dilemma rather than a lecture.
- The show's climax layers footage of recent forest fires that progress from overseas to Europe, the UK, and finally Arthur's Seat — collapsing the distance between climate abstraction and the audience's doorstep.
Why it matters: The review credits Higgins and Potter with threading a difficult needle: by casting a co-star who genuinely loves food, the activist premise becomes a felt dilemma rather than a screed, an approach other climate-theatre makers may want to study. The closing wildfire montage — creeping from distant continents to Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh — shows a deliberate strategy of ending satire with unignorable present-tense emergency rather than abstract argument.
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