Arts

It suddenly feels like there are as many productions of Hamlet as Real Housewives franchises. What makes the melancholy Dane the perfect Shakespeare anti-hero for right now?

In the latest big-screen adaptation of Hamlet, Riz Ahmed grips a car steering wheel, speeding through a tunnel in contemporary London as he delivers the title character’s “To be or not to be” speech. A critically acclaimed production of the play by London’s National Theatre—distinguished by its comedy—opens this weekend at Brooklyn’s BAM, starring Hiran Abeysekera (Life of Pi), and directed by Robert Hastie (Operation Mincemeat).

Another recent adaptation by the Peru-based Teatro La Plaza, culminating in a joyful on-stage dance party, was co-created by and starred a group of actors with Down syndrome. Yet another version is currently running at Brooklyn’s Irondale as a companion piece to Aeschylus’ The Furies. In the wake of the Oscar-winning success of Hamnet, welcome to a spring of Hamlet, with Shakespeare’s enduring story of murder, malevolent ghosts, familial feuding, and bloody revenge omnipresent on screens and stages.

Ahmed tells T&C that Hamlet is a “timeless story” itself containing elements of ancient myth (“Shakespeare was the reboot king”). While Ahmed’s movie is set in the South Asian community, the play’s themes remain universal, he says, “like loss, and loyalty to blood versus a duty to do what is right. To me, it feels very timely now because it is about a character grieving the illusion of the world as a fair place. I think that’s how we all feel right now, powerless in the face of increasingly shameless injustice. I think we’re all being gaslit about it and think we’re all feeling complicity with it.”

Having first read the play as a teenager, growing up in a British-Pakistani family, Ahmed recognized elements of the play within the Asian community, “like being told you who you can and can’t marry, squabbling over the family business, the spirit world, and family loyalty being non-negotiable.” He hopes the movie “honors the DNA” of Shakespeare’s play by making such elements “believable and real.”

“When you strip away the archaic, grandiose casing of Hamlet you have the story of someone who is at once horrified at the corruption, duplicity, and lack of compassion around him, and simultaneously complicit in, and a beneficiary of, that corruption,” the movie’s director, Aneil Karia, says. “Do people stay entrenched in that, or do they burn it all down, even if it means losing all their privilege?”

Prior to the current glut of Hamlets, there was Elvira Lind’s 2025 documentary King Hamlet, which followed her husband Oscar Isaac’s preparation to play the Dane in a 2017 Public Theater production. The Royal Shakespeare Company last year staged Hamlet Hail to the Thief, which combined the Bard and Radiohead in a fusion of theater, music and movement, while the documentary Grand Theft Hamlet focused on the efforts of two actors to meld Hamlet and online gaming.

Shakespeare scholar Jeffery R. Wilson, director of the Harvard Law School Writing Center, believes Hamlet’s endurance is principally down to its status as “the English language’s best artwork about death,” adaptable for actors and directors, and whatever social and cultural moment it lands in.

The key to its popularity as a play, Wilson tells T&C, is in its “amazing mixture of tragedy and comedy. The role of Hamlet requires an extremely good actor, often the best actor of each age, going back to Richard Burbage (1567-1619), and going forward to Kenneth Branagh, David Tennant, and Benedict Cumberbatch.”

As Wilson has observed “so many times” with his students, the play “encourages and sustains philosophical introspection from people who don’t usually do that kind of thing. There are no role models in Hamlet. It provides an opportunity for us to consider how we should lead our own lives.”

Chela De Ferrari, director of Teatro La Plaza’s Hamlet, staged at Theater for a New Audience, says the play powerfully holds together “the intimate and the political. At its center is a prince who is forced to move through uncertainty.We continue to return to Hamlet because we live in societies where people are forced to ask: What is true? What is just? When does silence become complicity? How do we act when we no longer trust the world around us?”

Because of Hamlet‘s privileged cultural status, and past provenance of “great actors,” De Ferrari wanted to “place that same text in the hands of performers with Down syndrome, people who are so often denied that kind of cultural value, to create a necessary tension. It asks who has been excluded from those spaces.”

Hastie, director of Hamlet at BAM, finds Hamlet “so human and funny, and so modern in its understanding of young people feeling dislocated from society. Hamlet is such a self-conscious play—it’s obsessed with acting and the theatre. We’ve enjoyed bringing out that self-awareness, and made Hamlet’s relationship with the audience central to the experience.”

All the productions show how bracingly chameleonic Hamlet can be. When Ahmed’s delivers “To be or not to be,” his Hamlet “isn’t asking, ‘Should I kill myself or not?,’” says the actor. “He is asking himself if he has the guts to fight back against injustice, even if he might be killed. It’s a game of chicken. He is trying to rouse himself, dare himself, into making this leap into action.”

Hamlet revolves around “questions of existence, legitimacy, and recognition, De Ferrari says. “‘To be or not to be’ becomes charged in a different way when spoken by performers with Down syndrome who, in many contexts, are not fully granted space, visibility, or authorship over their own representation. The question is no longer only philosophical, it becomes social, embodied, and immediate.”

Teatro La Plaza’s production is not about illustrating Shakespeare, nor about representing Down syndrome, she adds. “It is about what happens when these two realities meet, how they challenge each other, and how, in that encounter, both are transformed. The play becomes less about a single character’s crisis and more about a shared condition: the struggle to be seen, to be heard, and to define oneself within a world that is constantly interpreting you.”

And so the Dane proves eternally malleable. Ahmed is “less interested in the Hamlet who is commanding in his presence and poetry, and more in the Hamlet who is under pressure, who keeps talking because he can’t find the right words, and who feels misunderstood. How can you live a good life in a bad world? ‘Is it me going crazy or has the world?’ This Hamlet is all of us, struggling to get his head around a world that has lost its way, and in trying to do so he loses his.”

The test of a true classic, Hastie says, “is does it become a new and vital play simply by being performed in a new place by new people? Hamlet as a character is so complex and human that every time he fuses with a new actor you get something thrilling and original.”