Ham review – vegan take on Hamlet delivers meaty rebuke to carnivores

Summerhall, Edinburgh Vengeance for a slaughtered pig is the starting point for a riotous parody that suggests the meat industry poses an existential threat to human survival That’s my next hotdog ruined. Shakespeare’s “too solid flesh” is squeezed into a sausage-shaped form in Mary Higgins and Ell Potter’s inventively guilt-trippy new show. Leaping wildly from Hamlet, this outrageous, confrontational performance-activism layers hooting comedy with world-ending dread as Mary (a vegan) attempts to persuade Potter (nicknamed “the sausage queen” by their dad) to change their meat-eating ways. Transposing Hamlet’s existential questions to the future survival of humanity via the meat industry’s impact on the planet, Higgins takes on the role of our stubborn, sauntering prince, seeking vengeance for the ghost of a poor, slaughtered, strangely seductive pig. Suave and silly, Potter is both ghost and Gertrude, the latter reading madness into the truth only her son is brave enough to face. At Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 30 August All our Edinburgh festival reviews..