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• On one level, this is the simplest story Shakespeare ever wrote. It’s also the most difficult play to do, because so many choices about how the action unfolds are left up to the artists. There’s almost no back story, except for a few discussions about how Hamlet was in school in Wittenberg, his father died and his mother remarried his uncle. That is about all we know when we start the play. The events of the play unfold in a way that allows for a huge amount of interpretation. The questions of whether certain characters are villains, lechers, adulterers or spies—those are up to us to investigate, and in the text we have many choices.• The play, as it comes down to us in written form, also allows us many choices because there are several versions of the play. There’s the second quarto, which a lot of people consider to be perhaps the closest thing to what Shakespeare wrote and meant. Yet there are a lot of scholars who say it’s too long to have been performed in Shakespeare’s theatre. So, is this really a performance text or is this a text written to be read? Nobody has the answer to that. Then there comes the first folio, which has some lines that are not in the second quarto. And the second quarto has lines that are not in the first folio. This is a text that even in Shakespeare’s time and after his death was in flux. There is no definitive statement from the author as to how this play is to be performed textually. On one level, this makes you question what he had in mind. On another level, it’s fantastic to have to investigate and explore. I think that investigation makes for the most revealing, the most interesting, the most personal Hamlet.
• We arrive at this most famous play with more questions than answers. That’s the great secret and genius of Shakespeare. I’m often asked, “What is it that makes Shakespeare alive? Why do we still perform his work? Why is he still relevant to the world we live in?” It’s because Shakespeare dealt with all of the important questions of existence: family politics, power relationships, death, old age, youth, love, loss of love, getting love, man’s relationship to the cosmos, and man’s relationship to the gods. He dealt with all of these issues, but he never told us what he thought about these issues. He has told us only what to think about. The best experience of a Shakespeare play is when the actors, the director and the audience have an actual living dialogue, moment to moment, with Shakespeare and what he has written.
• I’m interested in exploring completely, carefully and deeply what happens in this play line by line. I think I do my best work that way—when I don’t try to squeeze a play that is ambiguous, complex, rich and textured into a small version of what I think, but when I try to expand my thinking into the myriad possibilities that the text offers. The exciting thing about this play is that the characters develop and change based on what happens. They don’t seem to arrive with fixed identities. They change based upon things that they never expected to happen to them at all. That is very modern, by the way. I think Shakespeare still appeals to us because of the ambiguity of his characters.
• One of the things that Hamlet must do is find out if the Ghost is true. He thinks it’s his father; he believes the story, but it is possible that the spirit is the devil in disguise, tempting him to do something else. Hamlet is a moral man. He’s not a killer; he’s not a murderer. Before he can think about the actuality of revenge, he has to find out the truth.
• We made the decision very early on to do the play in modern dress, partly because I had done it in period the last time, but also because I think the play is so universal. The problems of the characters are so much the same as ours. And since all of Shakespeare’s plays were done in modern dress in his lifetime—everybody wore doublet and hose, no matter whether they were in Denmark or Egypt or Elizabethan England or Rome—there’s a tradition, which started with the Globe, of doing these plays in modern dress.
To listen to a podcast of the full commentary from First Rehearsal, please visit ShakespeareTheatre.org and click on Digital Shakespeare.