A special one-off screening of HAMLET, followed by a Q&A with award-winning Swansea born Director Sean Mathias. Joining him on stage is theatre and film writer Rebecca Lenkiewicz, taking place at the Taliesin Cinema on Tuesday 13th August at 7:30pm.
Image by Bertie Watson
Having written the following piece in preparation for my production of Hamlet in the summer of 2020, the world went into a series of lockdowns and rather than sit home twiddling my thumbs for an inordinate amount of time I conceived a way of shooting the tale as a movie, with the Theatre Royal Windsor taking on the mantle of the legendary castle in Elsinore. Every last inch of the theatre is captured onscreen and by isolating in a bubble, the actors and crew were able to come together and live in a safe unit till filming was completed.
The stage show eventually opened in June 2021 and owed a great deal to the film which had paved a path forward in a time when theatres were closed across the globe.
Why would I direct Hamlet?
It isn’t easy to answer my own question. There have been so many accomplished and often dazzling productions of Shakespeare’s legendary play that it is hard to justify yet another interpretation. Or is it? Can an orchestra play Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Tchaikovsky over and over and in different ways with each talented musician, each brilliant conductor? Well yes. Every genius can be visited and revisited, over and over. But is a play very different from a concerto, a poem, a painting? A play requires a commitment of time and intellect and a massive span of concentration. More than a film or a concert? Possibly. A play needs the energy of the live and active audience – not that other art forms don’t. But a play inhabits a huge part of the
meta-imaginative landscape. The play’s the thing.
A play in which a character engaged in soliloquy with the audience to actually share THOUGHTS. Not plot or attitude or narrative but thoughts. Hamlet treating audience as psychologist. There is something irresistible about Hamlet. Is it because it is modern, even contemporary? Is it a thriller or a more subtle study of the vagaries of the fragile human mind? Are we able to like Hamlet, even admire him? Or do we pity him in his indulgent lack of ability, of action?
At this rare moment in our cultural and sociological existence I wanted to create a company of actors to produce two of the greatest plays ever written and I wanted to work with this company in a way that I have previously only done in a “workshop” or experimental environment. Unconventionally.
It is thrilling to direct a play that ponders more questions than it provides answers. And Hamlet with its tragic and conflicting dynamics has led me to work with a group of actors who are both conventionally or uniquely cast.
A woman is a man an old man is a young man the colour of my skin is irrelevant.
We live in a time where we re-define the abstract and the literal. We live in a time of immense confusion. And as we question the absolutism of the literal, we have a serious responsibility to define that alternative we are seeking. Perhaps Hamlet and his confusion and desperate quest to do the right thing, to seek out the only truth can help to find the “US” we are looking for. Perhaps this Hamlet with its iconoclastic attitudes will help us understand storytelling in this new age; understand our lives as they now unfold.
Find Out More and book tickets at
https://www.taliesinartscentre.co.uk/en/cinema?id=60095