The Hamlet Syndrome is a play based on Hamlet by William Shakespeare and the concept of the Hamlet syndrome, which presents the theory of fake insanity by the convicts in the court. The script was written by Masoud Tayebi and was performed in August 2022 at the Molavi Theater Center (Molavi Hall) in Tehran, Iran. Read More
Canadian comedy duo Johnny Wayne and Frank Shuster produced a series of television adaptations of Shakespeare. Various forms of the Wayne & Shuster show were staples on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC’s) Saturday evening television programming from the 1950s through to the late 1980s, and they have been occasionally rebroadcast as specials since the 1990s on both CBC and The Comedy Network. Read More
Ophelia is a one person show performed by Rojin Panahi and written and directed by Masoud Tayebi of the Mise.en.scene Academy of Performing Art. The theater group performed this play at “The 16th Yerevan Shakespeare International Theater Festival” in 2022. The play was performed in October 2021, February 2022, and February 2023 in Tehran, Iran. Read More
Dream of Hamlet is a modern interpretation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in shadow theatre. After moving to America and settling down there, Karagoz sets up a theatre with a close friend and decides to stage Shakespeare’s immortal piece of work. When the characters of Hamlet were reincarnated in different costumes and shapes in a Karagoz performance, what appears is a colorful and robust experimental theatre full of laughter, quick-witted humor and irony. In this lively show, the Anatolian puppet theatre Karagoz, a living tradition with 700 years of history, brings a modernist approach to the British playwright Shakespeare’s signature play by reconstructing its characters and theme in an entirely different context. Read More
In this hilarious retelling of Shakespeare’s life and writing process, the Turkish Cypriot comedians Mehmet Ekin Vaiz and Gülşen Erçin imagine William Shakespeare as a matrilocal who moves to Cyprus. Vaiz’s Shakespeare has an unhappy life as a dairyman and catalyses his frustration with his dominant wife and his daily chores of cleaning cow dungs by revising his plays that apparently had first happy endings into tragic stories. Further motivated by his excessive drinking of the local alcoholic drink zivania, this parodic retelling of the Cypriot William Shakespeare ends with a promotion of Othello, the local zivania trademark. Read More
Building upon Jacques’ theatrum mundi trope, 7 Şekspir Müzikali visualises the seven ages of man from cradle to grave. Being a collection of several excerpts from different translators, including those made by the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) alum Haluk Bilginer (1954-…) himself, the musical is built upon Bilginer’s almost one person performance where the rest of the cast as female fools accompany his dancing and singing through a well-choreographed pace. Performing all seven stages of man singlehandedly by referring to social and theatrical issues alike, Bilginer displays his great acting and life-long love relationship with Shakespeare in this almost two-hour musical. Read More
A one-person performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet directed by Işıl Kasapoğlu and performed by Bülent Emin Yarar. It is an outstanding performance as part of the Shakespeare Year and Shakespeare Week celebrations of Shakespeare’s 450th birthday conducted by the State Theatres. Read More
Ophelia’s Window was performed in 2020 in Baghdad, Iraq and directed by Monadhil Daood, who previously directed “Romeo and Juliet in Baghdad” and performed in other Shakespeare-derived Arabic plays including Sulayman Al-Bassam’s “Al-Hamlet Summit” (as Polonius) and “Richard III” (as Catesby).
Exiled Iraqi playwright and director Jawad al-Assadi wrote and originally staged the play Ophelia’s Window in 1994 in Cairo, Egypt. The play (loosely allegorizing Saddam Hussein as Claudius) was later published as Forget Hamlet in 2000; this is its first performance inside Iraq. Margaret Litvin, Associate Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at Boston University, has translated the play into English.
Synopsis
Ophelia watches Claudius murder the king and inaugurate a reign of terror unopposed by passive Hamlet. Claudius orders blind dissident Laertes tortured and liquidated; silences Gertrude; tries to seduce Ophelia; and sends two goons to assassinate Hamlet. A pair of gravediggers provides sarcastic commentary throughout. Read More
Hamik is a 2016 adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet directed and written by Eunsung Kim and performed by the Seoul Metropolitan Theatre. The production features a female Hamlet. The Seoul Metropolitan Theatre generously granted permission for the archive to host a video (with English subtitles) of highlights from the production. Read More
The tragicomic film chronicles the life of a masculine and a trans-feminine vagabond performers in the fifteenth-century Joseon Dynasty. The traveling actors stage multiple plays-within-a-film using the conventions of the all-male vagabond theatre with masks, or namsadang nori (a UN Intangible Cultural Heritage). The feminine jester Gong-gil’s sexuality is deliberately kept ambiguous throughout the film. When the two “clowns” are recruited as the king’s jesters in court, the narrative evolves to echo several themes and characters of Shakespeare’s plays including the revenge plot in Hamlet, the device of a bawdy play-within-a-play in Taming of the Shrew, and the love triangle in the aforementioned Twelfth Night. Read More
This television adaptation was first aired on March 21, 1979, in the program “Lletres catalanes” (Catalan letters), that the state-owned Spanish television broadcaster TVE devoted to productions in Catalan for spectators in the region of Catalonia, where Catalan would recover its co-official status (alongside Spanish) at the end of 1979 with the Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia. Bilingual novelist Terenci Moix (pseudonym of Ramon Moix i Meseguer) prepared a direct translation in unrhymed verse, abridged the text, and collaborated with director Antonio Chic the television script. Read More
In a land ravaged by strife and violence, actors and poets search for hope and inspiration in the words of the world’s greatest playwright. In this short documentary, Yemeni actors and actresses perform some of Shakespeare’s most famous lines, and a Yemeni poet recites a qasidah inspired by a Shakespearean sonnet. Why Shakespeare? Why Yemen, and why now? Watch and find out. Read More
In this children’s production of Hamlet, “to play” implies amusing or entertaining oneself while hearing a story, but also pretending to be someone else. These two ways of experiencing theater – observing it from the audience’s perspective and playing a role in it – have been joined together so that the children realize what it truly means, as the title of the show indicates, for one to be Hamlet (“Hamlet sou eu” [“I am Hamlet”]). Read More
Teatro da Garagem’s production of Hamlet, staged by Carlos Pessoa, trusts in minimal resources: the actors are mostly dressed in black and there are very few props. The set contains only a large wooden box which the actors move around several times in order to rearrange the space according to the scenes, so the box can be a stand where the characters sit to watch the play and a grave which hides half of the gravedigger’s body before the remains of Yorick pop out. Read More
Mala Voadora is well known in Portugal for the way it questions theatrical mechanisms, which is why it usually chooses contemporary texts over a classical repertoire. For their first Shakespeare, the company asked Fernando Villas Boas, one of Portugal’s main translators of the author, to write a version of Hamlet’s First Quarto (also called the “bad quarto”), which had not been previously translated. The text was then cut and adapted for the stage with some changes (lines of Hamlet were included and minor scenes were rewritten so as to create an organic whole). Read More
A modern topical adaptation of Hamlet by William Shakespeare was directed by Dr. Nilanko Mallik and performed by Shakespeare Youth Performances (SYP) at CLT Aban Mahal, Dhakuria, Kolkata, West Bengal, India on 29th of December 2016, Thursday, at 6:00pm.
“We welcome all of you who have come to watch our performance of Hamlet. Before we begin the play, let me ask you one question – what is the title of the play? Well, some of you know it – Hamlet, The Prince of Denmark. So it is. But does that mean that Hamlet belongs to Denmark? This is where we like to differ. In our production, we have made the setting Indian – rather, Kolkattan, so to speak…we don’t have kings and queens now, but we did have zamindars and now, we do have an ever- growing economically elite class in the Bengali society.
This is a production which shows Bengali families being beset with one tragedy after another. No, don’t worry, this is not going to be the plot of a mega serial – it will be Hamlet – told with all the mighty lines of Shakespeare, but in a Bengali setting. That’s right – this is a Bengali adaptation of Shakespeare, but not a bangla version of Shakespeare, as the lines are the bard’s.”
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In their third adaption of Shakespeare, Cia Vagalum Tum Tum transforms Hamlet into a comedy for young audiences in O Principe da Dinamarca. The action takes place in an abandoned graveyard where two amusing grave diggers, called “To Be” or “Not To Be”, decide to relive the story of the Prince of Denmark. The subject of death in the form of murders, suicide and violent revenge is treated humorously: all characters are dead and it is their skeletons that tell and enact the story of a prince who wants to revenge his father’s death. Blending elements of clowning, the humorous skeletons dance, play instruments, sing and perform. Read More
Having heard from the Ghost that Claudius murdered his father, Hamlet performs a play “The Murder of Gonzago” in front of Claudius and Gertrude. This play within a play convinces Hamlet that Claudius is guilty of the murder. After that, he prepares another play, called “rehearsal of revenge,” starring himself. Read More
Having heard from the Ghost that Claudius murdered his father, Hamlet performs a play “The Murder of Gonzago” in front of Claudius and Gertrude. This play within a play convinces Hamlet that Claudius is guilty of the murder. After that, he prepares another play, called “rehearsal of revenge,” starring himself. Read More
Hamlet Sincrético (Syncretic Hamlet, 2005) is a collaborative production by Grupo Caixa Petra that adapts Shakespeare’s Hamlet from a “black aesthetic”. It draws on Afro Brazilian cultural and religious syncretic elements as metaphors to retell Shakespeare’s tragedy. The production respects the linearity of the source play but does not reproduce its language which follows the particular nature of each character. The characters are incarnations of types or characters from Afro-Brazilian mythology and religions. For instance, while Hamlet’s role as the seeker of justice is associated with Xangô, the *orixá (or orisha) of justice and wisdom, the ghost is linked to Oxalá, the sky father orisha. Gertrudes is the queen of carnival and Polonius is characterized as a former *Candomblé priest converted into an evangelical preacher. Claudius is portrayed as Zé Pilintra, a folk character in the *Umbanda and *Catimbó traditions known for his bohemianism and wild partying. Read More
This 2007 production of Hamlet directed by Yoshihiro Kurita relies on elements of traditional noh theatre and the epic story-telling tradition of Japan to re-imagine Shakespeare’s play. The Hamlet character remains seated at the front of the stage throughout the performance while delivering his lines. Read More
Search: Hamlet centres around an absent Hamlet. Each participant enters a dialogue that develops and interprets the contemporary search for Hamlet in their cultures and communities today. Read More
Hamlet or Three Boys and One Girl, adapted and directed by Nikolay Georgiev was a largely improvisational production where the actors relied little on memorized cues and speeches. They used their own improvised English lines. Read More
A crumbling Arab dictatorship (a collage of real states) convenes a government conference amid car bombs in the capital, rebellion in the south, and an international army massed on the borders. English-speaking Arms Dealer (Nigel Barratt) sells to all, including Claudius, Fortinbras, Gertrude, the Islamist Hamlet, and the suicide bomber Ophelia. Read More
Ur-Hamlet is a multicultural project by Odin Teatret: a performance that brings together the Odin Teatret ensemble, a group of actor-dancers from Bali, Japan, Brazil, musicians from different parts of the world, and a long-term pedagogical project for young trainees from all over the world. Read More
Dave, an urban aboriginal in his early twenties, is a Montreal actor. His adoption at the age of 3 has erased all memory of his Native culture. Like Hamlet, the Shakespearean hero who he is working on in theatre class, Dave starts to experience an identity crisis. Read More
The translation and performance of Hamlet in the P’urhepecha language—still used by the native pre-Columbian ethnic group of the same name from the mid-west of what is now Mexico—is a fascinating example of how Shakespeare’s works can find its place and meaning in a culture that is radically different from that which produced them. The works of William Shakespeare have been staged in Mexico since the early Nineteenth Century. For instance, Hamlet was first staged in 1821, the year Mexico finally became independent from Spain. However, even nowadays, Shakespearean productions in Mexico sometimes rely on translations made in Spain, forcing performers and audiences to deal with a specific variety of a shared language that is not entirely their own. Read More
There were three Hamlets in the production, sometimes taking turns, sometimes together on stage. The idea reflected the schizophrenia of Hamlet. The arrangement allowed the audience to see different forms of Hamlet’s madness and confront different aspects of the protagonist’s personality. Read More
This 2009 production of I Am Hamlet was directed by Hani Afifi and stars Mohamad Fahim as Hamlet. Read More
In 2011, Carlos Rivas directed the production Hamlet/La Metamorfosis which starred awarding winning actress Gabriela Toscano as the melancholy prince driven to seek revenge for his father who visits Hamlet from beyond the grave to tell a treacherous tale about Hamlet’s uncle, the new king. Read More
In this production of Hamlet, there were three Hamlets, sometimes taking turns, sometimes together on stage. The idea reflected the schizophrenia of Hamlet. The arrangement allowed the audience to see different forms of Hamlet’s madness and confront different aspects of the protagonist’s personality. Read More
Translation into Assamese by AMRITJYOTI MAHANTA (PUBLISHED IN 1998)
Staged 2007 in New Delhi at the Annual Theatre Festival organized by The National School of Drama, Designed and Directed by ANUP HAZARIKA with ABHIJIT GOSWAMI in the role of Hamlet.
Hamlet from Gliwice. A Rehearsal or a Touch through the Pane by Lothe Lachmann Videotheatre “Beyond.” Based on Hamlet, with excerpts from the works of twentieth-century Polish playwrights Stanislaw Rozewicz and Helmut Kajzar. Read More
I’m writing You from a Distant Country is a contemporary version of Hamlet which was written and directed by Felipe Hirsch in 1997. Hirsch uses the text of Shakespeare as a pretext, reworking themes already dramatically elaborated in order to represent them as a new material to reflect on, making use of a metatheatrical structure that becomes the backbone of the spectacle in terms of content and conception. Read More
The production of Hamlet (1992) was part of a larger project idealized and concretized by the Brazilian director Marcelo Marchioro, in Curitiba PR, entitled “Shakespeare in the Park”, which aimed at popularizing Shakespeare for Brazilian audiences. The enterprise, which included lectures, workshops and other educational activities for actors and the general public, also included the mounting of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1991). The alternative space where Hamlet was performed, a large auditorium situated in São Lourenço Park, was totally remodeled for the production, with the creation of a sort of re-mediated Elizabethan stage. Read More
In Yang Jung-Ung’s Hamlet, Gut (shaman ritual) is integrated with modern performance forms. By focusing on that many characters in Hamlet are entangled in conspiracy and obsessed with a desire for vengeance, Yang Jung-Ung captures the characters’ dark inner sides and interprets them as a Korean sentiment called ‘han'(an emotion of sorrow and regret). Read More
Shakespeare’s play and Jules Laforgue’s fin-de-siècle Hamlet ou les suites de la piété filiale (1887), a version of the Hamlet story, are merged in Carmelo Bene’s film Un Amleto di meno (One Hamlet Less; Italy, 1973). From Laforgue, Bene takes some speeches as well as the characters of Kate and William – two actors of the theatre company arrived at Elsinore, with William also being the capocomico or lead actor and theatre manager – and the title of the film, which is from the French text’s conclusion: ‘Un Hamlet de moins; la race n’en est pas perdue, qu’on se le dise!’. Read More
In this 1984 musical comedy, produced for the Festival of Portable Theatre in Rabat, an Arab prince hires a British-trained theater troupe to stage Hamlet to “catch the conscience” of his usurping stepfather/uncle, who has married his mother after his father’s death. A shadowy figure named Abu Fawanees (“Lantern Man”) haunts the proceedings, offering commentary on the role of art in society. Read More
About Othello or Who’s Afraid of William Shakespeare?
Mise en scène : Ahmed el Attar et Nivine el Ibiary
Scénographie : Hussein Baydoun
Vidéo et musique : Hassan Khan
Création lumière : Charlie Aström
Costumes : Sawsan Bou Khaled
Régisseur Général : Alain Wright
Photos : Graham Waite
Staged in 1971, 1975, 1976-7
Author: Shakespeare (adapted by Mohamed Sobhi (Muhammad Ṣubḥī) from three Shakespeare translations: Khalīl Muṭrān, ʻA.Q. al-Qiṭṭ, and J.I. Jabrā). Directed for television by Nur al-Demerdash.
A crumbling Arab dictatorship (a collage of real states) convenes a government conference amid car bombs in the capital, rebellion in the south, and an international army massed on the borders. The female Arms Dealer sells to all, including Islamist Hamlet and suicide bomber Ophelia as well as Claudius, Gertrude, and Fortinbras. Read More
Hamlet, also known as Le Duel d’Hamlet, is a 1900 French film adaptation of an excerpt from the William Shakespeare play Hamlet. It is believed to have been the earliest film adaptation of the play, and starred actress Sarah Bernhardt in the lead role. It was directed by Clément Maurice. Read More
Ragnar Lyth directed this 1984 TV movie version of Hamlet starring Swedish star, Stellan Skarsgård (Good Will Hunting, Thor, Marvel’s Avengers). Read More
Released in 1913, Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson’s Hamlet is a black and white silent film with English subtitles. The film is a 22 minute version of the play, directed by Hay Plumb and produced by Cecil M. Hepworth. Other cast members include Gertrude Eliot, Adeline Bourne, and J.H. Barnes.
