Alas, poor Shakespeare. After 400 years you might be forgiven for thinking he's a little played out.
But Christchurch's Court Jesters have got a new way of bringing people to the Bard: mashing up Hamlet and video games in Hamlet: The Video Game (The Stage Show).
These days it's a bit hard getting a younger audience excited about Shaksepeare's work.
"A show like Hamlet, if you have no experience of Shakespeare and you go into it, that's going to put you off for life," actor Dan Bain told Newshub.
Director Greg Cooper told Newshub his experience of Shakespeare at school was "dire".
"You'd all sit in the classroom trying to read it aloud and no-one knew what they were saying. It just puts people off straight away."
So Hamlet: The Video Game (The Stage Show), playing this week in Auckland's Herald Theatre, has the answer - it reboots the Bard.
It re-imagines Shakespeare's classic, showing the revenge tragedy as an interactive video game, and making it a gateway into Shakespeare for people who might be put off by the 400-year-old language.
"Here with it kind of stripped back with the language, kind of made a bit more fun, it's way easier to buy into," Bain, who plays Hamlet, said.
"They're like, 'This story's amazing!' There's revenge, and backstabbing and battles and fights and poisoning and ghosts," Cooper said.
Hamlet's packed to the gills with more gaming references than you can shake an 8-bit sword at.
"As he goes through his journey to get revenge for the death of his father, we see on the screen his health go up and down depending on the fights that he does," Cooper said.
The play keeps most of the story intact for the traditionalists. It just has a little more fun with it - and a lot more fights.
"I've never bled as much onstage or killed as much on stage," said Kathleen Burns, who plays, among others, Gertrude, Ophelia... and Super Mario.
The actors say to any purists horrified by the idea, Shakespeare and video games aren't as different as people might think.
"They're both incredibly bloodthirsty and violent and exciting, and about themes like revenge and love," Burns said.
And the team aren't worried the man himself is doing a barrel-roll in his grave over it. They think he'd find it pretty cool.
"He was down with it - he was writing populist plays, he wants people to come and see his work. It's a great way to get young people into it," Cooper said.
Newshub.
