Hamlet becomes 'Ham': a porcine, climate-conscious Fringe show lands in Edinburgh
Shakespeare's Hamlet has been reworked as a dance-infused show about meat, climate procrastination and the power of shame — and it is playing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this August.
The show is called Ham, created and performed by Ell Potter and Mary Higgins under their company name, The Hotter Project. Ursula Martinez directs. It retells the tragedy almost entirely through meat-related puns, boiling the cast down to just Hamlet and Gertrude, with Ophelia played by a cat's ashes. The Guardian's review awarded it five stars and described it as "vividly, viscerally alive" (WhatsOnStage).
The performers' real-life dietary split is the show's engine. Higgins is a devout vegan; Potter loves sausage and meat. That tension drives a piece that uses the vegan-versus-omnivore debate as a frame for animal welfare and what it calls "climate-conscious theatre." The central argument is structural: Hamlet's famous dithering across Acts II and III — the soliloquies, the delays, the failure to act — is mapped directly onto humanity's own procrastination on climate action. WhatsOnStage describes the show as approaching the climate catastrophe debate "through a side door" (WhatsOnStage).
Ham was scheduled to premiere at Soho Theatre in London ahead of its Edinburgh run, according to Theatre Weekly (Theatre Weekly). The production has been billed as a "kinky eco-hijacking" of Shakespeare — a description that sits somewhere between marketing and fair warning. The official Fringe listing is live at edfringe.com (Edinburgh Festival Fringe).
The Fringe, for readers unfamiliar with it, is the world's largest arts festival, filling hundreds of Edinburgh venues every August with everything from experimental solo shows to touring theatre. A five-star Guardian review at this stage of a run is the kind of notice that can shift tickets quickly.
What makes Ham stand out is its refusal to lecture. The climate theme arrives wrapped in comedy, dance and the absurdity of two people arguing about sausages while performing the most famous tragedy in English. The puns are the point and the cover — a way to talk about planetary inaction without sounding like a policy paper. Whether that approach draws the crowds beyond the Fringe remains an open question, but the early notices suggest Potter and Higgins have built something that earns its Shakespearean scaffolding rather than borrowing it.
