The Bard for the 21st century

English Literature student, Elsie Bollinger, has used her Creativity Scholarship to produce collaborative group The Candle Waster's latest web series based on Shakespeare's plays.

Picture Hamlet, the tragic Prince of Denmark, as a young woman obsessed with comics and drawing and experiencing all the awkwardness of the teenage years. Or perhaps the comedic escapades in Much Ado About Nothing transplanted from an estate in 16th century Sicily to a present-day New Zealand high school.

Both scenarios feature in web series produced by an award-winning collaboration of four young women called The Candle Wasters.

With the name derived from a Much Ado About Nothing quote which refers to people who stay up late at night wasting candles, the group comprises Minnie Grace, Claris Jacobs, Sally Bollinger and her sister, Victoria University of Wellington student Elsie Bollinger. They met at Western Springs College in Auckland and began working on scripts in 2013, and in 2016 Robbie Nicol joined the writing team.

Now in their fifth year of production and with four popular web series and a short film under their belts, the group is about to release a fifth web series called Tragicomic, thanks in part to a Victoria University of Wellington Creativity Scholarship awarded to English Literature student Elsie Bollinger.

Tragicomic is Hamlet reimagined as teenaged Hannah and is both a web series and web comic that explores themes of mental health, sexuality, and the trials of being a teenager.

“It was a lot of fun taking such a well-known Shakespeare character and play and making our own story from that,” says Elsie.

Having completed courses in English Literature, Theatre, Psychology, Film and Television Script Writing, she says she has expanded her knowledge and understanding of film, the arts, and people and that has helped in producing the group’s “most ambitious” web series yet.

“It’s our first tragedy. Comedy is often more simple to translate because it’s about relationships and people being over-the-top. Hamlet is about avenging his father’s death, so we had to think about how we would interpret that in a modern context; we didn’t just want Hamlet picking up a phone and dialling 111.

Tragicomic is also a particularly exciting series for us because of the webcomic aspect to the series. The character of Hamlet, or Hannah in our series, is writing a comic which the audience can then read online as well.”

Creating this multimedia, multi-platform story is just another experimental step in what is a relatively new format.

“Web series are a really good way to be writing, directing, and filming your own content but without having to be restricted by a broadcaster. It’s also a great way to experiment, and the audience doesn’t have the same expectations that they do when they consume film or television,” says Elsie.

So what next from The Candle Wasters?

“As our stories have always been ambitious and we've made web series for the last five years, we're looking at other formats—including making a feature film.”