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In Simon Godwin's 2016 production of Hamlet, the opening images of an African court show Claudius' new regime and contrast with Hamlet's chaotic artwork on display in his rooms. Hamlet even graffitis on the portrait of the new king and his mother during the play.
This timeline charts our productions of Hamlet from 1961 to today. From bare studio spaces to graffiti smeared walls, and pyjamas to pistols, follow the production history of Shakespeare's most well-known protagonist.
- A 400 Year Stage History
- Political Censorship
- Garrick's Hamlet
- Nineteenth Century Hamlet
- Contemporary Hamlet
- Gielgud's Hamlet
- Olivier's Hamlet
- 1980s' Hamlet
- Hamlet on Film
Hamlet is the most complex and coveted role in classical theatre, attracting the leading actor of every age, and a few actresses as well, including a comically inventive Sarah Bernhardt, in the late nineteenth century, and Sarah Siddons, the great tragedienne of the late eighteenth century, who must be one of the few players to have tackled not onl...
Although the text of Hamlet was not subject to the kind of long lasting adaptations inflicted upon other of Shakespeare's plays in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was, nevertheless, shortened: long speeches were curtailed, bawdy references, including those of the mad Ophelia, were decorously cut. From the seventeenth century throu...
David Garrick, the predominant actor-manager of the eighteenth century, was very much a man of his time in focusing on the family and on filial emotions in his interpretation of Hamlet. Audiences were thrilled by the naturalism and emotional power of Garrick's acting, particularly in the tender expression of love for his dead father, and his contag...
All the leading actors of throughout nineteenth century proved their mettle in Hamlet : John Philip Kemble was a melancholy and rather too stately a Prince (he was described by Hazlitt as playing it 'like a man in armour'), Edmund Kean expressed eager love rather than terror on meeting the Ghost and his love for Ophelia remained evident even though...
Hamlet was brought startlingly up-to-date in H.K.Ayliff's production at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1925. The play held its mirror up to nature, as Hamlet requires that it should, and, in place of doublet and hose, there were plus fours, flapper dresses and bobbed hair: the Danish court were as fashionably dressed as their Midlands audience...
John Gielgud is the actor of the twentieth century most closely associated with Hamlet. He played the role five times between 1930 and 1944, and also directed Richard Burton as the Prince in New York in 1964. Aged 25 when he first took on the role, Gielgud brought out the character's youthful changeability and mercurial speed of thought. As always,...
Laurence Olivier played an athletic and fiery Prince in Tyrone Guthrie's full text production at the Old Vic in 1937. This production was remarkable for its interpretation of Hamlet's delay based on Freud's analysis of the Oedipal complex, in which the son unconsciously desires to kill the father and possess the mother. In this reading, Hamlet cann...
Hansgunther Heyme's production in Cologne in 1979 was fearlessly committed to an exploration of the boundaries between illusion and reality. His actors videoed each other with hand-held cameras which then multiplied every action via a wall of television monitors. Hamlet himself was represented by two actors, one of whom spoke the lines of Schlegel'...
In 1948 Olivier directed and starred in a film version closely following the Oedipal interpretation of his stage performance, but this time cutting Fortinbras to maintain a tight focus on the famil...The Russian director, Grigori Kozintsev, produced a powerful and highly atmospheric version of the play on film in 1964, with Innokenti Smoktunovsky as the Prince.Nicol Williamson played Hamlet and Mariane Faithfull Ophelia in Tony Richardson's film version of his production, originally staged at the Roundhouse in 1969.Derek Jacobi reprised his stage performance for the BBC TV Shakespeare series in 1980, directed by Rodney Bennett.Photos of Hamlet in performance in 2018, with Paapa Essiedu in the title role of Shakespeare’s great tragedy.
(John Peter, Sunday Times 6/5/2001) Photographs of productions of Hamlet staged at the first Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford date back to 1879, and our photographic archive includes images of productions right up to the present day.
1936. Here we have Donald Wolfit who played the role in 1936, striking an iconic pose, staring at Yorick's skull. This is the image of Hamlet that jumps into people's minds, even if they have...
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History in performance. Dr Nick Walton from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust talks about the history of Hamlet in performance on the RSC stage. This production from 2001, directed by...
