The pitch seems almost Pythonesque. Three actors, all of whom have played Shakespeare’s Hamlet, are thrown together in a rehab facility to help them address their addiction to playing The Dane.

Turns out that Hamlet Camp does offer rather more than easy chuckles at theatre’s expense – though it’s fair to say that its loudest appeal is to laughter.

Toby Schmitz, Brendan Cowell and Ewen Leslie: Hamlet Camp. Photo © Daniel Boud

The show opens with a triptych of self-composed poem-monologues, penned by Hamlet Camp’s performer-writers – Brendan Cowell, Ewen Leslie and Toby Schmitz – and inspired by the vicissitudes of an actor’s life.

Schmitz leads off with a prose-poem, Retail Therapy, a Bukowskian impression of his life away from the stage and screen, working in (and living above) a Newtown second-hand bookseller. Cowell strides on next, describing his peripatetic lifestyle and evolving appreciation of self-storage facilities. Leslie rhymes on the consequences of his stint as a child actor on the ABC adventure series Ship to Shore before the stage is given over to a short work of interpretative dance by Claudia Haines-Cappeau whose extravagant style leaves you unsure as to whether...