It’s a thrill for us at Rhinoceros Theatre - and an inspiring challenge -to present the greatest play by the world’s greatest playwright. 

Shakespeare’s HAMLET is not just a drama with the greatest
language ever heard on stage. (Count the famous quotes you never
knew came from one play). It’s an enthralling tale of murder and
misdeed. And it’s the exciting, profound, brilliantly told story
of a young man struggling to transcend his own tragedy, to
amend or avenge injustice, and to ‘grow up’ into a man in charge of his own life,
soul and destiny.

Fascinatingly and uniquely, it’s also a Shakespeare play about plays and playing.
About how these shape us and how, sometimes, we can shape them. In HAMLET a man guilty of murder is exposed by a play within a play. Hamlet, the prince who exposes him, is himself an ‘actor’ of a kind: a performative prodigy of changing moods and quicksilver thoughts, of masquerades and guises, of wit guile and a ‘gift of the gab’ unsurpassed by any other Shakepeare character.

“Speak the speech trippingly”, he famously instructs the travelling players
who present his play. And they do. And so, we dare hope, will our own cast.

Yet what lies beneath the spoken words and speeches in HAMLET? What world
lurks behind or below the famous soliloquies and the rapier dialogue?

Few productions do justice in my view - but we are determined to do so -
to what might be called the invisible dimension of HAMLET. The under-drama.
This, after all, is a play about dreams and visions. About deep-hidden dimensions of the human soul. About ghosts and spectres. (Of course we do meet one of them! The ghost of Hamlet’s father). About unearthly visitations and mortal and immortal
Intimations.. About the fears that stalk us, all of us, by night or day.

So expect a production that delves beneath the play’s lines to find
what I’d call the play’s ‘mines.’ (A recurring word in HAMLET). Those explosive
truths, revelations, nightmares and awakenings, to which we are all heir or prey as human beings living in this world.