HAM ****

"A Kinky Eco-Hijacking of Shakespeare's Hamlet". It's a seven-word sentence and five of those words sound like the best thing ever. Indeed, Hotter Project's funny, outrageous piece is one of tragic proportions and a maybe a highlight of Summerhall's programme this Fringe. 

The premise finds Hotter Project's Mary Higgins and Ell Potter adapting Shakespeare's Hamlet in a meta-theatrical and formally playful production. Potter apparently doesn't like Hamlet as much as Higgins, who plays the tragic protagonist with an adolescent angst that is perfectly suitable. Aside from all the other themes in this piece, it really is a love-letter to Hamlet, and it maps the spirit of the play onto a contemporary piece of theatre with genuine care and reverence. 

What it chooses to explore rather than Hamlet's machinations on politics, mortality and revenge is the right to eat animal flesh. Flesh is a key motif in HAM — flesh that is sweated and consumed, marked and categorised, exposed then covered then exposed again. Potter and Higgins are fearless performers and they have a real charm, unpretentiousness but are also willing to challenge us on our habits. This is a compelling environmental case for veganism delivered with panache. It is also a formally playful romp that shows us dances with ghosts, forum theatrical funerals and quotes and adapts bits from Hamlet with a playfulness and glee that still reinforces the key thesis of the work. 

It's a five-act structure and the acts, each slightly different in form are interjected by films documenting the performers visiting farms and animals being slaughtered. The play's climax is a film showing our irreversibly damaged world burning – this is moving. The scenes of violence some might find grotesque, but is in fact a violence we consent to every time we eat a ham sandwich are interesting tests for the audiences. Some squirm and cry, others barely flinch. These moments are a theatrical Rorschach test that are hugely demanding but never excessively. 

A moment in which Higgins' Hamlet interrogates a meat-eating member of the audience in a kinky dom outfit is exposing of our everyday practices. Ell Potter's meat-eating Gertrude (and Potter herself is a meat-eater whilst Higgins is vegan) is not berated for her choices, but regardless Hotter Project present the facts. What we have here is an act of remarkable theatrical empathy. Here is a theatre with a very obvious pamphleting message - but one that never judges, simply encourages you to hear out a different perspective. It is an act of negotiation in the way the best theatre is. 

The politics is perhaps a little simplified — a failure to mention, for example, the impact on food waste on the climate alongside food production is maybe a sign that the equation between meat-eating and climate change is broadly true, but a tad more nuanced. I think discussion of these elements would be implemented by adding more to the case rather than replacing it. But this is a minor quibble. HAM is a fantastic piece of theatre, Hotter Project and brave and brilliant performers, they're supported by a top-notch production team and you'd struggle to find anything as clever and empathetic at the festival. One to watch!

Summerhall, until 30^th August.