Director’s Notes

To say that staging Hamlet is a challenge is, at best, an understatement and at worst, a naïve remark that fails to capture just how provocative the Great Dane can be. It is always a privilege to work with our talented Theatre School members on productions, but watching them scale such heights has been nothing short of dizzying. But then comes the weight of expectation. With a lineage so long and so star laden, how can this story still be fresh, still exciting? How is it still relevant after over four hundred years? Well, at its heart, it is a surprisingly simple tale. A young person arrives home from university to grieve a lost parent. But when they do, they find that absolutely everything has changed. How can we choose to do the right thing if we have absolutely no idea what that is, or who to trust to help us?

This Elsinore is a world not too far away from ours. It is peeking into the future that we are now living, and we can see its shadows creeping across the borders between. So too, these experiences are not too far away from ours – we have all experienced indecision, distrust, fear. We have all loved, and most of us, lost. Even if we have not become parents ourselves, we are someone’s child. There is universality here. These incredible young people have claimed this story for all of us.