Hamlet (Guildford Shakespeare Company) @ Holy Trinity Church, Guildford
February 9, 2022
This review is of a preview, after press night was delayed. A week or so ago, The Stage awarded its ‘Unsung Heroes’ honour to all understudies, in recognition of a year that has not only seen planned understudies and swings working overtime to keep productions going as casts have fallen prey to COVID, but even …
Hamlet @ The Young Vic
October 25, 2021
Over the pandemic, most of us have had to get used to being apart from one another. I may be speaking for myself, but it’s been exhausting (if rewarding) to re-learn how to socialise, how to physically interact with others. Negotiating awkwardness and new boundaries is part of this, as well as remembering the social …
Hamlet @ Theatre Royal Windsor
July 25, 2021
A burst of applause unusual in UK theatres greeeted the entrance of the cast of Hamlet, who walked onstage in a line and stood facing the audience in what looked like a premature curtain call. Perhaps the applause was conservative (this was Windsor, after all), a throwback to an earlier time when the arrival of …
Ophelia (Cake Theatrical Productions) @ Esplanade Theatre Studio
July 22, 2021
‘My name is Ophelia, and today I will begin by playing Hamlet’. There are many great lines in Natalie Hennedige and Michelle Tan’s Ophelia, performed in English at the Esplanade Theatre Studio in March 2016, but the play is perhaps best summed up in this one, spoken by Jo Kukathas’s Ophelia. This is a deconstruction of …
Ophelia (Covert Media) (DVD)
January 3, 2021
John Everett Millais’s ‘Ophelia’ is a defining pre-Raphaelite work, and a profound interpretive influence on Hamlet, on stage and on screen. It’s the starting point for Claire McCarthy’s film of the same name, as Daisy Ridley’s Ophelia spreads her arms and flowers in a lake and slowly sinks beneath the water. The painting renders Ophelia passive, a victim, a portrait of …
Hamlet (Schaubühne Berlin) @ Avignon Festival Theatre (webstream)
April 2, 2020
As theatres around the world shut their doors to physical customers, they’re opening their archives. The global lockdown occasioned by the COVID-19 outbreak is hitting theatres hard, but it’s a gesture of goodwill and faith in the importance of theatre that institutions are making their content freely available, and it’s a gesture that I hope …
Hamlet @ Shakespeare’s Globe
June 30, 2018
Michelle Terry’s first season as Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe has shown a deep engagement with the Globe’s history in its combination of old and new, and nowhere was that more evident that in Hamlet. The introduction of a Globe ensemble, an actor-led rehearsal process (with Federay Holmes and Elle While taking nominal director credits), …
Hamlet (Almeida) @ The Harold Pinter Theatre
July 17, 2017
My expectations have, over the last few years, been set very low for West End Shakespeare; a result of sitting through so many celebrity-headed, bland and conservative productions. An Almeida transfer of a Robert Icke production, however, and one that prompted such divisive reactions, is a different matter and, even transplanted to a more unfriendly …
Hamlet (RSC) @ The Royal Shakespeare Theatre
August 4, 2016
Seeing the same ensemble of actors take on Hamlet two days after Cymbeline, I was struck by the demands placed on a company performing these two long plays together – the mercifully shorter Hamlet still ran to an energetic three hours and fifteen minutes. And this is one of the consistently strongest ensembles I remember …
Hamlet (Sonia Friedman Productions/NT Live) @ The Light, Leeds
October 30, 2015
Fortunately, given that I was extremely poorly during last night’s screening, everyone and their doctorate seems to have written about Hamlet already. There are really great pieces out there by Tom Cornford, Holger Schott Syme, Eoin Price, not to mention most of the newspapers at least twice, after the ‘controversy’ (read: storm in a teacup) …
Find, follow, join us
