A Poor Player production; November 2015 @ Keble O’Reilly Theatre, Oxford
In November 2015, I composed the music for a production of Hamlet at the Keble O’Reilly Theatre, produced by Poor Player Productions and directed by James Watt.
You can listen to excerpts from the soundtrack below, and watch the trailer for the production here:
“Stephen Hyde’s incredible original soundtrack for the production [was] ominous and unsettling… echo[ing] with a dark urgency.”
Alice Moore, Oxford Student [preview]
“The cinematic, urgent soundtrack vitalises the dramatic tension, which, coupled with a kind of cynical humour, is deeply engaging without disrupting the play’s most tense moments.”
Shahryar Iravani, Oxford Student [review]
The music in Hamlet sought to reflect it as a revenge drama. At its centre is a tortured hero, a human psyche in turmoil, and this angst-ridden trauma was imbued in the soundtrack through its use of stabbing strings, pulsating rhythms and reverberating drums. On the flip side of this driving anger is Hamlet’s melancholic inertia, painted through plaintive bell-tones and slowly shifting soundscapes. My influences were wide ranging, from Bernard Herrmann horror to Aphex Twin electro-ambience to the meditative minimalism of Estonian composer, Arvo Part. Conjuring up a cold and unforgiving Danish landscape, the Hamlet soundtrack most essentially strove to hold up a mirror to the darkest inner-workings of its manic protagonist. Have a listen here:
stephen hyde 