cast:

Created in collaboration between award-winning playwright Adam Mathias (See Rock City and Other Destinations) and artistic director William Addis, and starring Bakerloo favorites Sarah Murphy and Gwyn Hervochon, who have appeared in every production since our first season as well as Joseph McGranaghan (Ariel in the The Tempest, Lopakhin in Cherry Orchard) as Hamlet, this thrilling four person adaptation uses Shakespeare's text in a post-modern exploration of the English language's most enigmatic anti-hero.

Joseph McGranaghan as Hamlet

director William Addis with Adam Smith

DIRECTOR'S NOTEBOOK:

“Hamlet has been performed, for that
matter, in evening dress and in circus
tights; in medieval armour and in
Renaissance costume. Costumes do not
matter. What matters is that through
Shakespeare's text we ought to get at
our modern experience, anxiety and sensibility.”
— Jan Kott, Shakespeare our Contemporary

“The phenomenon of Hamlet, the prince
without the play, is unsurpassed in the
West's imaginative literature. Don
Quixote and Sancho Panza, Falstaff, and
perhaps Mr. Pickwich approximate
Hamlet's career as literary inventions
who have become independent myths....
Hamlet remains apart., something
transcendent about him places him
more aptly with the biblical King David,
or with even more exhaulted scriptural figures.”
— Harold Boom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“He is that unique thing in literature, a
credible genius. But the reason is that
Shakespeare has kept our view restrcited
to the surface. Here is an intellectual
seen altogether from the outside. We
know him as one from the way he
behaves, not from the things he says he
believes...he is a soul in agitation, his
equilibrium has been lost.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“But how will Hamlet have fulfilled that
other, less definite and more disturbing
injunction: “Remember me”? For
Hamlet, to be called to remember is to
be called back to life. Before his
encounter with the Ghost, Hamlet had
lurked in the shadows of Claudius’ big
court spectacle, cloaked in black, eyes
downcast, visage dejected, drawing
himself up only to make acid
comments... In this eerie play of the
uncanny and the half-remembered,
Hamlet gives us here perhaps that sense
of the preternatural, of the possession
and wonder that we associate with
tragedy. The play has hinted from the
beginning that the past is “prologue,” yet
heeding its call can ultimately be as
mysterious and animating as it is decentering.”
— Kent Cartright, "The Memory of Hamlet"

“The time of our fathers
Is not ours to kill,
Their sad-cellared wines
Are not ours to spill
And won't be passed over Good Friday.

Though this life
Is Ash Wednesday,
It's Ash Wednesday,
It forever approaches Good Friday.”
— Elvis Perkins, "Good Friday"

“Whatever became of the moment
when one first knew about death? There
must have been one, a moment, in
childhood, when it first occurred to you
that you don't go on forever. It must
have been shattering, stamped into
one's memory. And yet I can't remember
it. It never occurred to me at all. We
must be born with an intuition of
mortality. Before we know the word for
it, before we know that there are words,
out we come, bloodied and
squalling…with the knowledge that for
all the points of the compass, there's
only one direction and time is its only measure.”
— Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

“For it is only habit and memory that
dulls the physical passion. Without
memory, each night is the first night,
each morning is the first morning, each
kiss and touch are the first….Each
person knows that somewhere is
recorded the moment she was born, the
moment she took her first step, the
moment of her first passion, the moment
she said goodbye to her parents.”
— Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams