Past Productions: 2008

I wanted to do Hamlet in a modern context. I try, I suppose, to make it what I call 'modern iconic', so you can look at it and not quite know which decade it is, but it has an accessibility. With characters like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Horatio and some of those middle-range characters, it enables you to know precisely who they are because of the signifiers of their dress which, if they were all in doublet and hose, might be much more difficult to convey.

One of the early rehearsals was of the Opening Scene, and we were rehearsing in working lights, so all the lights were on in the grid and in the auditorium but there was no light on stage. It was very useful as a rehearsal because I couldn't see the actor's faces, but I could hear the text. It takes quite a lot of muscularity and effort to get the actors to speak in this particular space, sometimes even speaking upstage, to be able to get that text freshly across to the audience, to make them feel as if they're hearing it for the first time.

All the main characters talk about their soul, therefore they have a relationship to their soul, and they have a relationship to repentance. Without peppering the play with a lot of crucifixes or something, you don't have to forefront the belief system in order for them to really have it. In fact, if you sometimes do that, you scenically forefront that it's a religious world, you can leave the responsibility to that, and somehow the actors never quite convey the intensity of belief. But it is one of the most difficult things to invest in the show: that profound sense of their philosophy.

So you have to make rules about the Ghost and then stick to them. One of those was: because he's insubstantial and a spirit, does that mean he can't be touched? Can he touch his son or can he not touch his son? We ultimately decided that the physical contact is rather extraordinary when it happens, because you don't perhaps think it's going to happen.

The Courtyard isn't an easy space: you have to make sure that you use the diagonals, that you don't block members of the audience. People don't mind if somebody stands in front of them as long as they don't stand in front of them for very long, or during a big speech. It does seem to me that it's the best place for Shakespeare. It's the best and most live space because when Hamlet debates, he debates with you. He's not talking to himself. You don't just watch this mad bloke natter away, you are engaged with his dilemma.

There's a piece of text in the Court Scene which is fascinating about the fact that secretly the new king Claudius is setting up a whole build-up of armaments. It seems to be happening secretly: through the night there are factories belching out new arms at a rate of knots and nobody seems to know really what this is all about. That piece of information comes after you've seen the Ghost for the first time, so probably you don't hear it anyway because most people think, "That was the Ghost." They're either thinking, "That was well done" or "No, it's a rubbish ghost," so they don't always hear that. But I think it's our job to make you hear those bits.

© RSC 2009
Transcription by Veryan Boorman
Edited by Suzanne Worthington, Kate Wolstenholme
Photography by Ellie Kurttz

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