Premiere New York Premiere
Production Language English
Country of Origin England, United Kingdom
Description This just-announced addition to the BAM 2001 Spring Season features Simon Russell Beale in the title role giving a performance that critics have hailed as one of the great Shakespearean interpretations of our time. Staged and directed by John Caird, who is internationally renowned as the co-director of Les Miserables and director of the RNT’s Candide which received the Olivier Award for best musical production (and for which Beale won the Olivier Award for best actor in a musical), this is a Hamlet not to be missed!
Audiences will remember Beale’s hypnotic Iago in the RNT’s production of Othello which played for six sold-out performances at BAM in 1998. “Confirming Beale’s position as one of the foremost actors of his generation” (Observer, UK), his portrayal of this “first-rate, deeply intellectual Hamlet...is everything one could hope for: witty, ironic, intelligent” (Guardian, UK). The role garnered him this year’s London Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Actor and an Olivier Award nomination.
Triumphing over conventional notions of how Shakespeare's youthful Dane could be portrayed, Beale conjures a fresh, unearthed Hamlet, whose tender combination of wit, dignity, irony, and vulnerability thoroughly involves us in this imaginative staging. Featuring sumptuous Elizabethan costumes, Caird’s production emphasizes the family drama at the play’s center, as well as the play’s surprising dark humor.
Identifier 2001s.00709
