The production skillfully blends the radically different quarto and folio versions and aims to illuminate the world’s most fascinating theatre text rather than impose some superficial interpretation. 

Hamlet is revealed as a troubled young man who can trust no one, not even the ghost of his father. His attempts to find a moral or meaningful response to the murder of his father and his mother’s remarriage to the chief suspect end in tragedy. On  the way to it’s violent  climax the play illuminates and explores the human condition  with such profundity that Hilaire Belloc famously noted: “if a person has not read or seen Hamlet they may as well have spent their life at the bottom of a deep well.”

The production focuses on Hamlet as performance, since most of the characters are performing a lie: old friends are spies, Claudius performs the role of a good step father, his mother that of a caring parent, Polonius of an honest broker, and even poor domed Ophelia pretends she is alone with her one time lover. The greatest actor of all is Hamlet, who performs his own illusory madness. Nothing is what it seems and there are no fixed meanings, the world literally drives those who try to make sense f it’s riddles quite mad.

The play will be performed in English by the American Drama Group Europe.

Duration: 90 minutes

Photo: Hamlet ©Grantly Marshall