Review: too much of water, Old Red Lion Theatre

As their contribution to the 2025 Camden Fringe The Old Red Lion is hosting Shakefest, a celebration of works by or inspired by Shakespeare. too much of water, written and performed by Brock Looser, here gives voice to the story of Ophelia, a girl driven to suicide by exceptional circumstances, which the blurb tells us merits only 173 lines in Hamlet compared to her ex-boyfriend’s 1,506.

From the very start Ophelia shows us she is determined to break her confines, in this case the fourth wall, as she addresses the audience and actively touches hands with someone to make a tangible connection. She takes control of the narrative, ensuring we are listening before even beginning to tell her tale. Ophelia is just an everyday young woman, but her experience has been extraordinary and life changing – a mother lost, an ex-boyfriend who has gaslighted and emotionally wounded her, leaving her blamed, shamed and powerless to argue. Finally, he has accidentally killed her father in a reckless attempt to murder his own uncle. It’s no surprise her mental health is unstable. Looser plays the part in relatable modern dress – soccer shorts and a t-shirt, bridging the centuries-old story to our modern day and seamlessly demonstrating a link.

The play addresses important mental health issues, and an ongoing patriarchal attempt to control women. It boldly challenges the audience to recognise who has the power to speak and to be heard. And in our modern time we have vocabulary that makes clear what is so scantly described in Shakespeare’s original, including ideas of victim shaming and gaslighting. Looser’s Ophelia is friendly, likeable and intelligent, but desperate to be heard and validated. She is an engaging storyteller, carefully drawing the audience in, while playing out the tale with clarity and focus. It’s an engrossing hour, given texture by imaginative staging. A sequence acting out Ophelia’s childhood using Barbie dolls is funny and playful, yet also speaks wordlessly to lost innocence and imagined familial idealism. The experiences she relates resonate loudly with today’s world where women – especially young women – must fight to be acknowledged; regularly mansplained to, with their opinions suppressed or dismissed.

The story is punctuated by the inclusion of music (Emma Haines) which helps set the scene for a variety of locations, such as the river or a disco, but at times the songs feel a little self-consciously levered in. Lighting shifts by designer GM work well to suggest geographical and temporal changes and to define Ophelia’s state of mind. In flashback, Hamlet’s voice is heard grossly distorted, which is appropriately nightmarish but does make it rather difficult to hear what’s being said.

The world we inhabit today is different from that of Shakespeare’s time and Ophelia’s choices are different too. She chooses to heal and simultaneously her brother chooses to make positive change. It’s a message of individual choice, and movingly uplifting as Looser cleverly empowers Ophelia, reclaiming words that are historically Hamlet’s to make them her own.

This is an engaging, considered production that effectively challenges difficult issues concerning attitudes to women, and Looser does a great job of making the audience an active part of the conversation. She leaves us with a real sense of possibility for change and, helpfully, access in the programme to a UK mental health directory.

You can read more about this show in our recent interview here.

Written by Brock Looser
Directed by Avery Looser
Movement direction by: Alexandra Montalbano
Music Composed by: Emma Haines
Lighting Design by: GM
Produced by: BraveMouse

too much of water has completed its run as part of Camden Fringe.