A decade ago you couldn’t move in London for celebrity-fronted productions of Hamlet, with the likes of Michael Sheen, Rory Kinnear, Benedict Cumberbatch, Andrew Scott and Paapa Essiedu all taking a crack at Shakespeare’s greatest play in the space of a few short years. Of late, they’ve thinned out a bit, and the ones we’ve had lately, have had relatively lowkey leads: see the National Theatre’s production last year, or the RSC’s Hamlet Hail to the Thief in which Radiohead’s name is in bigger lights than any of the cast.
Anyway, that all ends in 2027 as star of Happy Valley, McMafia and the new season of House of the Dragon James Norton has a go at the ennui-engulfed Danish prince.
It’s something of a holder announcement: the production won’t run until 2027, and we don’t know the exact dates or even which theatre it will happen in. We certainly have no idea who Norton’s co-stars will be. However, we do know the most significant piece of information, which is that it’s being directed by the revered German director Thomas Ostermeier, boss of the revered Schaubühne theatre in Berlin.
Europhile theatre nerds will possibly be aware that Ostermeier’s provocative, highly physical, highly edited Schaubühne take on Hamlet is one of the theatre’s most successful shows, having been in the repertoire there since the late ’00s (and has toured to the Barbican in the past). This is emphatically not that production, and while the younger Ostermeier made some quite, uh, ‘iconoclastic’ comments about the original text back in the day, one assumes this more be a more Hamlety Hamlet than his most famous take. Exactly how weird we’re talking is to be seen, but it’s worth noting that despite his fairly mainstream telly career, Norton’s biggest theatre role to date was with another leftfield European director, in Ivo van Hove’s take on A Little Life. Don’t go expecting trad Hamlet, is what we’re saying.
Hamlet will run at a TBC West End theatre in autumn 2027. To be the first to receive an update, sign up at hamletwestend.com.
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