Director’s notes/ Description

TNT present a dynamic and clear version of this sprawling
text, one that has thrilled audiences and critics across the world.
Directed by Paul Stebbings the production includes a powerful and moving
musical score by composer Thomas Johnson. TNT and ADGE’s HAMLET tours to
some thirty countries on three continents in 2008.

Hamlet is perhaps the most fascinating play ever written. It is also a complex and sometimes frustrating mix of different traditions, beliefs and source material. Prince Hamlet’s own problems are those of the audience: what is the morally correct line of action? How should that moral end be achieved? What is the relationship between revenge and justice? There are three different versions from Shakespeare’s time, varying hugely in length. There are also at least two major sources that pull in a different directions from Shakespeare’s own additions to the story. The famous “To be or not to be” speech is even omitted from the first published version (The Quarto).

The early sources are medieval and almost pagan, the later sources Catholic in their theology, while Shakespeare’s setting is contemporary and Protestant (Wittenberg being Luther’s University while the Ghost explicitly describes Catholic Purgatory). The Prince himself finds this difficult to digest, stating clearly that Death is “that undiscovered bourn from which no traveller ever yet returned” only a few scenes after meeting a ghost with three witnesses. Is it summer or winter? The ghost appears on a freezing castle battlement, but two months earlier the old King was sleeping in his orchard, and two months later Ophelia floats to her death on a raft of flowers. Faced with these problems many modern productions simplify the story and concentrate on Hamlet’s “weakness” of procrastination or delay.


As Laurence Olivier says in the introduction to the 1948 film: Hamlet is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.Our new production will challenge this traditional idea and try to demonstrate that the confusions in the play Hamlet are the confusions in the Prince’s mind. Shakespeare is a dramatic poet not a realist nor a Romantic. He is concerned with powerful dramatic effect. We do not see the Prince as being a man flawed by indecision, but a man paralysed by a moral problem. It is surely not a tragic weakness that Hamlet refuses to kill Claudius at his prayers if we go along with Shakespeare and accept that Claudius would be forgiven if he goes to the final Judgement saying his prayers. But the act of prayer reminds Hamlet (and the audience) that murder is wrong, even in revenge. Hamlet’s madness is both an act and a way of confronting the “rotten” state of Denmark with the truth. Hamlet is clear in his pursuit of truth, the play is a wonderful detective story, and he hopes that the truth will lead him to an answer to his moral question. His tragedy is not so much his own failure to act, but the essential human tragedy of Death itself. Death is the ultimate truth and as Hamlet goes deeper he constantly ends up confronting the death of those he loved or himself. Perhaps Hamlet succeeds so well in the theatre (whilst being rather confused upon the page) because its central metaphor is the paradox of performance: it is the Player’s performance that unmasks Claudius, it is Hamlet’s feigned madness that allows him to speak the truth and it is the whole play itself that holds a mirror up to our troubled human consciousness as it tries to make sense of morality and death.

After the success of MACBETH and A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM, director Paul Stebbings, will continue the company’s exploration of Shakespeare’s major works in the spirit and style that reflects Shakespeare’s own time and theatrical resources. The production tours Europe and Asia from May 2003, including the summer open air “Castle Tour” before proceeding to tour to major theatres in autumn and winter.