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Ophelia Thinks Harder is a play by Jean Betts. It is a feminist retelling of Hamlet by William Shakepeare, with Ophelia as the central character. It uses and reutilises the text of Hamlet and other Shakespeare plays alongside modern text. It is considered a classic New Zealand text, and is studied and performed in schools.

The play opens in Ophelia's bedroom, where she is impatiently waiting for the results of the Maid's magic, and hoping it will tell her who she is fated to fall in love with. She expresses annoyance and frustration at not knowing her fate. Hamlet enters Ophelia's bedroom, and baffles her with equal declarations of love, and academic examinations of female hormones. He leaves her feeling bewildered and confused as to whether he loves her or not.

Production history
Ophelia Thinks Harder was ﬁrst performed at Circa Theatre, Wellington, on October 14th 1993, as part of a festival of new plays by women marking New Zealand’s women’s suffrage centenary.

Characters
The play is written for the minimum cast of 9. Subsequent productions have had casts of between 14 and 30, allowing one part per person, multiple Ophelias, extra court members and occasionally onstage armies.


 * Ophelia
 * Maid
 * Hamlet
 * Horatio
 * Queen
 * Rosencrantz (female)
 * St Joan
 * Guildenstern (female)
 * Ophelia’s Mother
 * Polonius (Often doubled with Laertes)
 * Laertes (Often doubled with Polonius)
 * Father
 * Player 4 (a boy about 12 years old)
 * King – optional
 * Virgin Mary – optional

As a Feminist Text
Betts wrote Ophelia Thinks Harder as a response to her lack of connect with the character of Ophelia.

"The seeds of this play were sown when during an acting class, tutors expressed surprise that I had made Hamlet ‘a believable woman’ when delivering one of his famous soliloquies as an exercise. Why the surprise, I thought? Why the difﬁculty accepting that women (and actresses?) are capable of experiencing and expressing Hamlet’s complexities? It is unfortunate that in the magniﬁcent old classics which reign supreme in our collective theatrical subconscious, the fascinating, complex, tortured, passionate, angst-ridden, cosmos-questioning and deeply funny characters are almost always male. By pushing feminism and humour into bed together, I aim not merely to entertain but to meddle ruthlessly with this subconscious. Too many of us still have difﬁculty accepting that women are as capable as men of these ‘male’ attributes and qualities, and I hope this play helps to dismantle some of the foundations of this deeply buried prejudice.The answer was not to cast a woman as Hamlet yet again, but to explore Ophelia; to ‘let her come in’, and ‘strew dangerous conjectures in ill breeding minds’. After all, she has at least as much reason as Hamlet to rage and despair. Her culture forces her into a boring and pointless existence, reinforced by her bossy brother and father. She has to adjust to the loss of both parents (eventually), and cope with cruelly dismissive behaviour from her boyfriend. So she is a complex, confused, intelligent, moody and passionate creature in her own right.I remembered studying Hamlet at school, and like most other girls in my class, identifying with him and ﬁnding Ophelia alien; while at the same time being aware that even so, too often in my life I was judged not on how I measured up to Hamlet, but on how I compared to Ophelia. Few boys experience this trauma. It isn’t fair. I dedicate this play to all girls who felt, and feel, the same." (Jean Betts)