NEW YORK – He's on screen, onstage, on tour, online and in song. “Hamlet” — William Shakespeare's masterpiece about a moody Danish prince — seems to be having a moment.
A National Theatre production has landed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music starring Hiran Abeysekera. There’s a movie version set in London’s South Asian community starring Riz Ahmed. Anthony Hopkins, at 88, is delighting fans on TikTok with some of Prince Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” soliloquy. The movie “Hamnet” — the fictionalized story of loss that inspired the creation of “Hamlet” — earned Jessie Buckley an Oscar. Taylor Swift's “The Fate of Ophelia” — that's Hamlet's ex — went to No. 1 on the Billboard singles chart. Eddie Izzard is taking her one-person production of the play on a worldwide tour.
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Four hundred years on, “Hamlet” — whose seemingly quite modern antihero is endlessly mulling over what to do after his uncle murdered his father and married his mother — is still giving.
Want even more? There’s even a “Hamnet” play, adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s original novel, and the Royal Shakespeare Company is taking it on a U.K. tour. Shakespeare & Company plans a northeastern U.S. tour of “Hamlet” this year. There’s a Canadian production of “Hamlet, Sweet Prince,” using a queer, contemporary lens. The Acting Company in New York will have a modern-verse version led by a woman and the Peruvian theater company Teatro La Plaza recently presented a version off-Broadway starring eight Spanish-speaking actors with Down syndrome.
Harvard's Jeffrey R. Wilson, a Shakespeare scholar, says “Hamlet” is perfect for our era, when the crush of bad news has triggered constant, existential check-ins, like: “Hey, how’s everyone hanging in there?”
“People are exhausted from the onslaught of awfulness in the world,” he says, “and ‘Hamlet’ gives audiences both permission to ‘go there’ to explore those emotions and a tool kit of ideas to help us process angst.”
A neurodiverse ‘Hamlet’
The plethora of works are markedly vibrant and fresh, from the Hamlet in Brooklyn who wears a beanie to the one who enjoys Bollywood-style dances in London.
“Great plays survive not because they remain untouched, but because they can continue to be transformed,” says director and playwright Chela De Ferrari, from Teatro La Plaza, whose neurodiverse “Hamlet” is a visceral and urgent call from those often excluded from cultural narratives.
“Working with actors with Down syndrome and cognitive disabilities brought me back to something essential in ‘Hamlet’: that beneath its philosophical brilliance there is an exposed human being asking, in one way or another, how to exist in a world that keeps misreading him,” she said.
In one of the show’s most potent moments, an actor attempts to imitate Laurence Olivier’s delivery of Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” soliloquy with an image of the famous actor projected on a screen. It takes on a new urgency when spoken by someone whose very right to be in public or artistic spaces is often questioned.
“I like to imagine a kind of continuity between our actors and all the great actors who have carried the play before. I believe Shakespeare lives in all of them,” says De Ferrari.
Shakespeare in a BMW
On school trips to see Shakespeare plays, filmmaker Aneil Karia always felt like they were an arm's length away.
“I felt like I was primarily watching an intellectual experience unfold and I had to use my brain to keep up with the plot and the language and everything like that,” he says.
He teamed up with Ahmed and screenwriter Michael Lesslie for a stripped-down, modern-day retelling of “Hamlet” that leans into the title character's unease at being complicit in a corrupt business system.
“That feels so pertinent to the moment we’re in politically and everything. It feels like the question a lot of people are asking,” says Karia. “It feels like these stories are actually a conversation through time itself.”
Hamlet here parties at a neon-drenched nightclub and delivers his soliloquy while hurtling down rain-slicked London streets in a BMW, taking his hands off the wheel as a truck approaches head-on. To be, or not to be, indeed.
“The best best-case scenario here is that it’s opening up Shakespeare to audiences who didn’t think it was for them, or who struggled with it previously,” says Karia, whose film starts streaming Tuesday. “This is a big call, but I feel like Shakespeare would approve. I feel his whole thing was like, ‘Take this stuff and do your thing.’”
A more clownish prince
The “Hamlet” in Brooklyn leans into the humor of the play for one good reason: The guy playing Hamlet is naturally funny.
Abeysekera is manic and mischievous as he pulls out the play's physical humor, addressing the audience directly in his soliloquies, sometimes sitting at the edge of the stage and making eye contact.
“It’s a very self-aware play. It sort of really knows that it’s a play, if that makes any kind of sense,” says director Robert Hastie. “Hamlet knows he’s in a play called ‘Hamlet,’ like Deadpool knows he is in a film called ‘Deadpool.’”
Abeysekera tackles his “To be, or not to be” speech as an errant thought, a wisp of an idea, instead of the traditional foot-planted, actor-y, big-thing-coming approach.
“Rather than thinking, ‘Oh, here’s the big speech coming up and that's freaking me out,’ I started thinking, ‘It’s such a thought that most of us kind of have,’” he says. “Sometimes, in front of the mirror, we just see ourselves and go, ‘Oof. Today’s a tough day.’”
Hastie believes “Hamlet” is one of those works that reveals something new all the time. Grounded in the human condition, it speaks fresh things to each audience and we discover new things that have always been there.
“One of the reasons I think why we’re still talking about Shakespeare, and this play in particular, is that whenever those words fuse with a new actor or a new group of actors, it becomes a different play,” he says. “Maybe that’s a good working definition of a classic.”
An extremely online bard
Caitlin Cardile is doing her best to keep the 400-year-old playwright alive in the TikTok era. She and her three-person troupe Mad Spirits Theatre Company are on virtually every social media platform spreading the word.
“We wanted to bring Shakespeare to a modern audience and make it understandable,” Cardile says. “We want people to feel more comfortable with Shakespeare and not think that it’s old English and such a hard thing to understand.”
They post live readings and commentary of the plays on YouTube but it's on Instagram and TikTok where the true coolness starts. They find trending audio snippets — of everything from dialogue on “The Office” to a Lady Gaga song — and assign a Shakespeare character to say them.
So Kitty Forman's popular line “I may have been a little irrational today” from “That '70s Show” is lipsynced by an actor playing Ophelia. A section of dialogue between Scar and Simba from “The Lion King” is put in the mouths of actors playing Claudius and Hamlet.
“We’re like, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if we took these silly trending sounds that everybody’s doing and what if we put them to Shakespeare characters?'” says Cardile. “This has ended up being so much fun.”