Hamlet ★★★★☆

With all the intrigue and vengeance stripped out: all you have left is a young man who wants to die, and his best friend who wants him to live.

Hamlet, The Lion and Unicorn Theatre ★★★★

This play was advertised as “guaranteed to be unlike anything you’ve seen before”, and it delivers on that promise. It’s a great vehicle for the best lines from Hamlet, but it is not Hamlet. It’s something else entirely, and still very good – clever, pacy, and exceptionally funny.

The stage is a student-y living room, including drug paraphernalia, half-drunk cups of tea, scattered books and magazines, and a sofa that only a landlord could love. The only characters we see on stage are Hamlet and Horatio, who between them take on a fraction of the original text. All other characters and scenes are dispensed with. Director Harry Reed has reconstructed the four-hour tragedy about revenge, madness, inaction and suicidal ideation into an hour-long play where that suicidal ideation takes centre-stage.

There is something almost frightening about Joseph Ryan-Hughes as Hamlet. He has the air of a conspiracy theorist, pacing the stage with nervous and frantic energy. His face is wonderfully expressive, and he speaks with convincing spontaneity. This actor exactly nails the combination of fragility and cruelty and humour which make Hamlet such a compelling character.

“Were you not sent for?” Hamlet shouts at one point. Horatio denies it, but if you were Hamlet’s mother, Horatio is exactly the man you’d send for. Alex Dean plays Horatio as a steady and patient presence, and words originally written for other characters sit naturally in his voice. Taking on all these contradictory lines gives him a multifaceted quality. But rather than becoming, like Hamlet can be, a Rorschach test of inconsistencies that you could read anything into, he remains a fixed point. He is the same man, trying every angle he can think of to keep his friend alive.

Hamlet is quicker-witted, and maybe smarter, but Horatio knows how to be a person, without veering from crisis to crisis. Horatio makes no attempts to match Hamlet’s level of energy: he waits, he reacts, he turns the television on. Even with only two actors on stage, it’s possible for one of them to fade into the background. Despite the asymmetric dynamic, their friendship is clearly deep and enduring. Most of Hamlet’s soliloquys are spoken directly to Horatio. It’s a phenomenal performance from both actors, and I’d love to see them play the same roles in a full version of Hamlet.

There’s a scene where Hamlet is watching the players, and is distraught to see an actor crying during rehearsal. He laments,

“Tears in his eyes, distraction in's aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? and all for nothing!
For Hecuba!

What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? What would he do,
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have?”

But in this version, unlike Shakespeare’s original, Hamlet has no real motive or cue for passion. There is no evidence of any foul play in Hamlet’s father’s death, except for Hamlet’s own feverish and drug-addled imagination. He is not feigning madness, but is straightforwardly mentally ill. In the absence of the spying and intrigue of the Danish court, he is not feigning anything.

In the final scene of Hamlet, after his mother falls down, dead and poisoned, Hamlet cries, “Treachery!” and calls for the doors to be locked. Laertes speaks immediately, saying, “It is here, Hamlet,” and confesses his plot to kill Hamlet, and the king’s involvement. In this production, instead it is Hamlet who says “It is here.” He jabs at his forehead, identifying the source of the treachery as his own mind.

I used to desperately want a tattoo on my ribcage which would say, in elegant, curling script, “The rest is not silence but belongs to me.” It’s a line from one of my favourite poems, ‘The Elegy of Fortinbras’ by Polish writer Zbigniew Herbert. I thought it was a beautiful way of saying: whatever griefs I encounter, whatever losses I bear, the future is mine for the taking. But once I learned that my cousin Lindsay was struggling with suicidal thoughts, this tattoo idea became impossible. Fortinbras is genuinely mourning, and it’s complicated, but the tone of his elegy is partially triumphant. He is built to exist in the world, and Hamlet is not.

Watching this version of Hamlet was really difficult for me, because it hit so close to home. With all the intrigue and vengeance stripped out, all you have left is a young man who wants to die, and his best friend who wants him to live. Hamlet has so much going for him: energetic intelligence, cups of tea and takeaways, a loving and concerned friend. But what good could it do, when something like that had taken root in the brain?

When the end comes (spoiler alert), it is upsetting without being a satisfying narrative. Watching someone talk about killing themselves for an hour, and then eventually committing suicide, is a bleak experience. Sometimes a person’s mind doesn’t work right, and they want to die. There is no good reason for it. It isn’t destiny, and it isn’t a revenge tragedy, but it happens anyway. However unhappy this is to imagine, it is true. In this respect, this Hamlet has held the mirror up to nature.

A shorter version of this review was written for Everything Theatre. Hamlet has completed its current run. Follow Series 2 Theatre Company for future shows.

My cousin, Lindsay Riddoch, was a talented poet and energetic campaigner for mental health. She took her own life in December 2017. Her family and friends have set up a fund to raise money for mental health research in her memory. See Words That Carry On for more information and to donate.

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Elegy of Fortinbras, by Zbignew Herbert

Now that we’re alone we can talk prince man to man
though you lie on the stairs and see no more than a dead ant
nothing but black sun with broken rays
I could never think of your hands without smiling
and now that they lie on the stone like fallen nests
they are as defenceless as before The end is exactly this
The hands lie apart The sword lies apart The head apart
and the knight’s feet in soft slippers


You will have a soldier’s funeral without having been a soldier
the only ritual I am acquainted with a little
There will be no candles no singing only cannon-fuses and bursts
crepe dragged on the pavement helmets boots artillery horses drums drums I know nothing exquisite
those will be my manoeuvers before I start to rule
one has to take the city by the neck and shake it a bit


Anyhow you had to perish Hamlet you were not for life
you believed in crystal notions not in human clay
always twitching as if asleep you hunted chimeras
wolfishly you crunched the air only to vomit
you knew no human thing you did not know even how to breathe


Now you have peace Hamlet you accomplished what you had to
and you have peace The rest is not silence but belongs to me
you chose the easier part of an elegant thrust
but what is heroic death compared with eternal watching
with a cold apple in one’s hand on a narrow chair
with a view of the ant-hill and the clock’s dial


Adieu prince I have tasks a sewer project
and a decree on prostitutes and beggars
I must also elaborate a better system of prisons
since as you justly said Denmark is a prison
I go to my affairs This night is born
a star named Hamlet We shall never meet
what I shall leave will not be worth a tragedy


It is not for us to greet each other or bid farewell we live on archipelagos
and that water these words what can they do what can they do prince