They cast South Asian actors to play Hamlet and Gertrude

In this version of Hamlet, the titular character is played by Hiran Abeysekara while his mother, Gertrude, is played by Ayesha Dharker. Both actors have South Asian origins, with Dharker being born In India and Abeysekera being from Sri Lanka. By contrast, Claudius (Alistair Petrie) and the Ghost of the Old King (Ryan Ellsworth) are both played by white men.

I think this brings up interesting ideas about power and entitlement.

Both Gertrude and Hamlet are played by actors who come from countries that were historically colonised by Britain. In fact, British India (which is now India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar) and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) were two of the British Empire’s most important colonies. India was known as the ‘Jewel in the Crown of the British Empire’.

Britain took part in something known as ‘colonial extraction’ in India: taking everything they could from a region that once had a very powerful economy until it was left with practically nothing. Similar practices happened in Sri Lanka, too. Britain forced both regions to produce goods and food to export. So, very little of the indigenous peoples’ hard work actually went back to helping their communities. Instead, it went to make Britain rich while making those colonies stall and decline.

Plus, these regions weren’t settler colonies like America, Australia and South Africa. In settler colonialism, the colonisers come and decide that they want to live on the land now. To get rid of the natives, they often commit genocides.

The colonialism in British India and Ceylon was extractive. The British weren’t trying to set up permanent colonies, really. Most of the British colonisers would just live on these big compounds for some time to keep an eye on the indigenous people and make sure they kept benefiting the British Empire. Then, they’d go back to their lives in the UK. Some well-known British figures participated in this, including the late Prince Philip’s uncle, Lord Mountbatten.

George Orwell was an officer in the Indian Imperial Police for a while! It made him realise just how exploitative the Indian system was:

…it is not possible to be a part of such a system without recognizing it as an unjustifiable tyranny.

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

The British extracted wealth from these places even as people starved, with a famine raging in Bengal while Britain continued exporting rice from other Indian regions for the soldiers in World War II, letting roughly 3 million people die. In fact, Winston Churchill himself refused to help the Indians multiple times, saying that the local people caused the famine by ‘breeding like rabbits‘.

On top of all of that, when the Indian people did rebel or revolt, they were treated like they were the problem. They were loved and treated as the ‘crown jewel’ as long as they were useful for the British. As soon as they needed help or tried to break away from the colonial rule, they were treated like savages. For example, during the Indian Rebellion of 1957, the famous poet Christina Rossetti made a whole fictional account about how Alexander Skene and his wife died, called ‘In the Round Tower at Jhansi’, that treated the Indians like animals:

The swarming howling wretches below

Christina Rossetti, ‘In the Round Tower at Jhansi’

But what does this have to do with Hamlet? Well, I don’t think this casting choice is a coincidence. Alistair Petrie’s Claudius treats Gertrude like a prize. She offers him everything he could possibly want, after all. By marrying her, he legitimises his claim to the throne (Denmark was an elective monarchy at the time) and really seems to replace the Old King fully in everyone’s eyes. He even groups Gertrude and his crown together when talking and uses possessive pronouns, suggesting that both are inseparable and his property:

That cannot be, since I am still possessed

Of those effects for which I did the murder:

My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen.

Claudius in Hamlet (Act 3, Scene 3)

Not only does he put her last in the list of benefits he gets from regicide, but he also lists her as one of his ‘effects’. We don’t have evidence that people used the word ‘effects’ to mean ‘goods’ or ‘property’ during Shakespeare’s time (Etymonline suggests it was first used almost 100 years after Hamlet was written in 1704). However, in this more modern performance of the play, there’s no denying that this second reading of the word definitely comes into play.

In this performance, it’s pretty clear that Claudius uses both Gertrude and Hamlet as tools to further his own political growth and security, just like Britain did with India and Sri Lanka. He parades Gertrude around when she’s useful to him, and addresses Hamlet for the first time publicly, emasculating him in the same way 18th and 19th-century colonisers often emasculated Asian men. You get the sense from this added racial element that this is intentional: he forces Hamlet to obey him in front of everyone to show that he can control his nephew and calls him ‘unmanly’ in the process.

Then, when Claudius feels his control over the throne slipping after ‘The Mousetrap’, Alistair Petrie’s performance has Claudius becoming more and more aggressive, showing that his love for his wife only extends as far as she’s useful. He uses violent, erratic movements that are the most obvious in the scene between Claudius and Gertrude after Hamlet talks to his mother in her chambers. He physically grabs Gertrude, which leads her to show fear and disdain towards him for the first time – something we’ll talk about later on.

When you couple that with the modern phenomenon of ‘passport bros‘, who seek out Asian women because they think they’re more ‘feminine’ than Western women (as well as their predecessors who would get ‘mail-order brides’ from Asia), it’s clear that this performance of Hamlet emphasises the power imbalance between Claudius and Gertrude. She becomes his exotic, beautiful, objectified woman who exists to further his reputation and ambition. It’s like he colonises her body the same way Britain colonised India. There are some interesting nods towards Orientalism in this casting choice that really fascinate me. They heighten the powerlessness of Gertude and the fact that she has to appease this powerful white man in order to survive.

Making our titular Hamlet South Asian like her suggests that there is more of an allegiance between the two than you might assume from the source text. They are the only two South Asian people in a court where most of the other people with power are white. Hamlet’s only other ally, Horatio (played by Tessa Wong) is also an Asian person, who would go through similar experiences of Orientalism and exoticisation.

The interesting thing is that there are other people of colour in the cast! However, none of them are powerful people who have a huge amount of control over Gertrude’s and Hamlet’s lives. One of them is Fortinbras, who is Hamlet’s foil. The other is Rosencrantz, who has Indian descent, but is largely white passing when you’re in the audience. Plus, Rosencrantz is a traitor who Hamlet believes should be on his side. That adds another interesting dynamic.

Then you have the matter of surveillance and suspicion. In a post-9/11 and post-War on Terror world, there is no denying that South Asian men are often met with more scrutiny than a white man would be. We’re literally seeing people employ othering and islamophobia against Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed right now as a way to discredit them. People of colour in general are seen as more dangerous, particularly black people and those who the Western world would assume are Muslim.

That is going to impact how a 2020s audience react to a South Asian Hamlet. It emphasises the surveillance and suspicion in a racialised way. The fact that Hamlet’s anger and despair over the death of his father is treated as worse than Laertes is emphasised because it mirrors how people of colour are often treated like their negative reactions are more threatening than white people’s. It really is more obvious, then, that everyone in Elsinore treats Hamlet like a problem and a threat – more so than the white characters who also display violent desires.