Hamlet (National Theatre, 2025)

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Hamlet (National Theatre, 2025) is an excellent performance to watch if you are studying this text for an English Literature course. It’s particularly useful for A-level English Literature students, as well as those studying AP English Literature and Composition. To be a top student in either course, it’s important to explore alternative readings of a text. This version of Hamlet is so perfect to mine for alternative interpretations that it almost feels like it was invented for that purpose!

I had the pleasure of being able to go to see it live at the National Theatre in Southbank. However, it is currently available through the National Theatre’s streaming platform, National Theatre at Home. I highly recommend you check it out!

For A-level English Literature in particular, adaptations and performances are one of the best ways to build up a bank of high-level AO5. Lots of students focus more on finding critics who speak explicitly about their quotes. However, I’ve found that some of the most sophisticated discussions of alternative interpretations come from the students who talk about the different versions of the text they’ve seen.

So, watching as many as possible will definitely give you a leg up and help you to get closer to that A and A* – as long as you can use the interpretation to back up your argument, not just mention that an alternative interpretation exists.

In this resource, I’m going to give you a summary of the creative choices that I noticed in the National Theatre’s 2025 version of Hamlet starring Hiran Abeysekera.

For each one, I’ve also included some thoughts on the interpretation I gather from the creative choice, as well as some themes or big ideas it might be connected to. They are in no particular order, but they are well described in the headings. So, I recommend using the table of contents to help you find a particular idea you’re looking for.

I might make some passing comments about whether or not I personally liked the creative decision, but this resource is supposed to be descriptive, not a review. The purpose is to show you lots of different ways that Hamlet can be performed, not to decide whether a particular performance is good or not. You’re welcome to tell me if you liked it or not in the comments, though!

Please also use the comments to add some things you noticed, too! It’s useful for these resources to become as collaborative as possible. Plus, I might just add here in the main resource with a credit back to your community profile!

Note: This resource is not a replacement for watching Hamlet (National Theatre, 2025)​. It contains spoilers, and everything written here is my assessment. I highly recommend watching it for yourself, as you may find other interesting things to talk about.

This resource contains affiliate links.

Performance Interpretations

The interesting thing about performances is that they don’t make their interpretations of the text explicit. So it’s a bit like Inception in that way: an interpretation within an interpretation.

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.

The actress who plays Ophelia is a little person

In this National Theatre version of Hamlet, the character of Ophelia is played by Francesca Mills, who has a form of dwarfism known as achondroplasia.

Personally, I’m aware of how common it is for people to patronise and infantilise adults with dwarfism, simply for having different bodies. So, every time another character says or does something that implies that she is a child, it makes me deeply uncomfortable. Watching this performance of Hamlet, I found that I was uncomfortable way more than expected, which made me starkly aware of how much Ophelia is belittled throughout the play.

Sometimes, it was the creative decisions that the National Theatre made, such as when someone picks up Ophelia like she’s a child. But most of the time, it came from her discussion with Polonius when Laertes is leaving home. It made me aware of how both her brother and her father treat her like a child who is being manipulated by Hamlet.

Mills’s acting choices heighten this massively. She plays Ophelia so differently from the versions I’ve seen in other performances and adaptations – especially Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 film. In this National Theatre version, Ophelia is a witty, sharp party animal, which creates an interesting contrast with Abeysekara’s quieter, more sensitive and misanthropic Hamlet. She talks with confidence and her tone is often dripping with innuendo.

There’s a really interesting part where she’s rushing off to a party with her friends that make it seem like she’s a lot more aware of sex than Polonius gives her credit for. Her friend mimes lassoing her and she plays along provocatively. So when Polonius treats her like she’s naive, it makes me wonder, ‘Are you sure you’re talking about the Ophelia in front of you?’

In the 1996 Kenneth Branagh film adaptation, Ophelia seems sensitive and innocent. Francesca Mills seems more like your average 21st-century university student. So when people act like she’d be a victim in a relationship with Hamlet, it makes you really wonder. Do they treat her like this because she’s a woman? Because she’s a little person? Maybe both? That forces you to confront and really focus on the contrast between how Polonius talks about his son Laertes (actively wanting to encourage rumours of his sexual promiscuity) versus his daughter.

Combine that with what I said earlier about how the power imbalance between Claudius and Hamlet is more obvious in this version because of the casting choices. After all, Ophelia is a white woman who is marginalised for her gender and her disability, but this Hamlet is also marginalised for his race in ways others aren’t. This Hamlet seems sensitive and his emasculation at the hands of Claudius is more obvious.

That makes the power dynamics between Ophelia and Hamlet more complicated, thanks to intersectionality. In most other versions of Hamlet that I’ve seen so far, there is no racial aspect of the play. So, you have an educated white man possibly manipulating a more demure, innocent white woman. In this version, there are so many more intersectional aspects to take into account.

Not only is Abeysekara’s Hamlet a South Asian man, but he’s also one of the few people of colour in the court and he’s constantly being emasculated, controlled and surveilled by the people around him. His power is extremely low. By contrast, Ophelia is much more confident in the court. She is clearly popular, likeable and well-connected. People don’t regard her with the same level of suspicion as they regard him. And her madness is seen as a tragedy while his possible madness is seen as an inconvenience or a threat.

And then there’s the added aspect of how people with physical disabilities and impairments are treated in Shakespeare’s work, as well as in theatre more broadly. I think Richard III is a useful example of this, where Queen Margaret describes the titular King Richard III as a ‘poisonous bunch-backed toad’.

Often, texts will draw on physiognomy by using a character’s outward appearance to communicate their personality and characteristics. It often leads to people with physical disabilities and impairments associated with negative behaviour and often evil.

In this performance of Hamlet, though, Ophelia being a little person is not in any way associated with evil or any other negative traits. In fact, I would argue that Ophelia doesn’t really display any negative traits at all! She’s bubbly, funny and confident, and her interactions with her father and her brother early on garner laughter from the audience. And these likeable qualities are endearing in their own right. She has funny banter with the other couriers and battles with her brother to finish her father’s platitudes. This makes her endearing in her own right – in a way that is not associated with her dwarfism.

So when people belittle and underestimate her, it’s even more uncomfortable for the audience due to the fact that she’s already gained the audience’s endearment on her own terms. The audience knows that she’s not naive and childlike; they know that she is an independent, funny and witty woman who has a clear understanding of the world around her – more so than her brother, Laertes, who is allowed to go to Paris on his own.

That draws even more attention to how differently she is treated compared to the other characters. It really makes you wonder, ‘Would this Ophelia really be so easily manipulated by this Hamlet? Do people simply underestimate her because she’s a little person and a woman?’

Therefore, this casting decision brings up themes of appearance vs reality as well as mistreatment, hypocrisy and marginalisation. We’re challenged to think about what makes everyone treat Ophelia so differently to someone like Hamlet, as well as the true cause of what leads to her eventual madness.

Hamlet has a moment alone on stage before the courtiers join him

In this version of Hamlet, the director, Robert Hastie, has chosen to give Hamlet a little bit of breathing room before the start of the audience chamber scene in Act 1 Scene 2.

It happens straight after the end of Act 1 Scene 1, when Horatio and the guards decide to inform Hamlet about the ghostly apparition of his father. From there, we cut to black and Hamlet walks into the audience chamber with a single spotlight on him. The rest of the stage is in darkness. His expression is sad and comtemplative as he looks at a sash he’s holding in his hands and then places it on a chair.

This seems like a simple moment that doesn’t need a lot of discussion. However, I think it’s important for us to remember that Hamlet is a very long play and bits naturally got cut out for this performance. So if they chose to spend a minute or so letting us just linger on Hamlet as a character before the play’s full action begins, it’s a safe bet to assume they did it on purpose!

For me, the interesting thing here is that Hamlet doesn’t sit on the seat where he placed the sash later in Act 1 Scene 2. He sits on the seat opposite it. So it’s almost like he’s holding that seat for someone important – someone who never shows up. Is it his father, Old Hamlet, that he leaves the sash there for? Like’s he’s reserving him a seat?

This idea is emphasised in the discussion between Hamlet and Claudius later in Act 1 Scene 2, when Claudius talks about how ‘sweet and commendable’ Hamlet’s grief is. Alistair Petrie, who plays Claudius, taps the chair with the sash on it a few times as he talks about the Old King. This suggests that Claudius also sees the presence of the sash as Hamlet saving a seat for his dead father. It is a small but suble gesture that automatically clues the audience into the idea that Hamlet isn’t ready to fully come to terms with the death of his father.

Within the original text, Claudius’s words would suggest that there is something inherently wrong with Hamlet’s methods of mourning. His comments that Hamlet is displaying ‘unmanly grief’ are emasculating, suggesting that men either shouldn’t mourn the death of their fathers at all, or that they should find another outlet to get over it.

The thing is, as a modern audience member watching a modern performance, I would argue that Hamlet’s method of mourning his father is actually quite healthy here. I’m surrounded by images in the media and in my culture of people reserving seats for family members who have passed away at weddings, or pouring a drink for someone they love who isn’t around anymore. It’s a simple, non-destructive way to deal with the fact that you’re still thinking about them.

And we see later on in the play what happens when Hamlet decides to adopt more traditionally manly, violent methods of dealing with the death of his father. He becomes the avenger archetype, eroding his sense of identity and killing the wrong man (Polonius) in the process. I think there is a real juxtaposition to be seen here: Claudius emasculates Hamlet for grieving in a pretty healthy way that’s pretty non-destructive to the people around him. When Hamlet instead turns to an arguably more manly version of grief, the whole court suffers for it.

To me, this harkens to a Francis Bacon quote that I think is essential for anyone studying a revenge tragedy like Hamlet:

This is certain, that a man that studieth revenge, keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal, and do well.

Francis Bacon, ‘Of Revenge‘

Bacon here suggests that grief can be made worse by an obsession with revenge, even if anger and violence are the stereotypically manly responses to a negative emotion. I think that Robert Hastie’s National Theatre (2025) version of Hamlet here emphasises Bacon’s point. Hastie presents us with Hamlet originally choosing a method of ‘healing’ his ‘wounds’ that’s actually really healthy. That makes it even the contrast between healthy unhealthy coping mechanisms even clearer.

Plus, you can tie it to bell hooks’s arguments in The Will to Change, where she suggests that men and boys are ‘coerced’ into converting their emotions into violence:

There is only one emotion that patriarchy values when expressed by men; that emotion is anger. Real men get mad. And their mad-ness, no matter how violent or violating, is deemed natural – a positive expression of patriarchal masculinity. Anger is the best hiding place for anybody seeking to conceal pain or anguish of spirit.

bell hooks, The Will to Change

In fact, hooks’s point here is evident from the very source text itself. Claudius is critical of Hamlet’s form of grief while validating and even applauding Laertes’s grief when Polonius dies later in the play. There are plenty of interpretations of why he might do this. For example, it could be that Laertes’s grief and anger are useful for him to get what he wants, while Hamlet’s grief is an active threat to his position as the King of Denmark. But it could also be an issue with the very expression of that grief. Laertes displays a form of emotion that ‘patriarchy values’, while Hamlet does not. Laertes is praised because his grief is performed in a ‘natural’ way, while Hamlet’s is not. It’s feminine.

But just like Hamlet, Laertes’s more manly display of grief leads to impulsive decisions that he immediately regrets. Even when Hamlet tries to apologise for the death of his father, it’s his honour and masculinity that prevent Laertes from resolving the conflict in a healthier manner. So, the tension between what we as an audience would see as normal, healthy grief and what Claudius celebrates is clear. Claudius’s expectations of masculinity and masculine emotion are actively destructive.

Plus, this version does a lot to show that Hamlet doesn’t actually ask to be addressed by his mother and uncle. He smiles when Claudius introduces his mother and sits with everyone else. Abeysekara’s mannerisms and acting choices in this scene are subtle, suggesting that Hamlet really isn’t trying to draw attention to himsef – except, perhaps, in the distinctly teenage method of dressing unusually. He wears distinctly funereal clothing and paints his nails black, slightly subverting gender norms. But apart from that? It doesn’t seem like he wants to be called out for his grieving method. He’s just minding his own business and gets policed on his gender performance.

This starkly constrasts with Kenneth Branagh’s 1996, where Hamlet stands apart from everyone else and speaks loudly, as if he wants to be noticed. By contrast, the National Theatre (2025) version suggests that Hamlet wants to be left to his grief. It emphasises the fact that it isn’t until people (namely, Claudius and Gertrude, followed by the Ghost) tell him how to react that his coping strategies become murderous. People’s policing of his masculinity and what he should and shouldn’t do lead him down a fatal path.

All of this from a silent moment and a sash placed on a chair, huh? Well, it’s more of a catalyst for other ideas that you can bring in from other parts in the text.

Hamlet doesn’t seem to fit in with the court in Act 1 Scene 2

I mentioned earlier that Hamlet doesn’t seem to want to stand out in the court scene and how that contrasts other versions of the performance, such as Kenneth Branagh’s and also the Bristol Old Vic (2022) version where Hamlet wears a literal mask for this scene. But while Abeysekara’s Hamlet tries to appear mostly inconspicuous in the crowd, that doesn’t mean he looks like he fits in.

He is the only one dressed in a funereal, all-black outfit.

Emphasis on the word ‘funereal’ here. Other men do wear dark colours. For example, Claudius is in mostly black. However, Claudius’s outfit looks more like it’s suited to a coronation or military parade than a funeral. It’s adorned with a baby blue sash, multiple medals, gold epaulettes, and red and gold trimmings. It’s luxurious and fit for a king; it doesn’t look like Claudius has just come from the funeral of his own brother – because he hasn’t. He’s already married his brother’s widow, Gertrude, at this point. Polonius also wears a dark suit, but it’s navy blue rather than black.

It seems to suggest that Hamlet is the only character still actively in mourning over the death of his father. Everyone has moved on; most of the characters wear vibrant colours that relate much more to Claudius’s marriage than the funeral that made it happen. The characters around Hamlet don’t display the contradiction that Claudius identifies when he says that everyone needs to display ‘mirth in funeral’ and ‘dirge in marriage’. They’re just all happy to continue with their lives.

To me, this is noteworthy. The fact that the people of the court are so quick to move on could suggest one (or more) of the following things:

• They have decided that Claudius is a better king than Hamlet’s father.
• The court is full of sycophants who are performing happiness to get in the good graces of the new king.
• The court is celebrating the peaceful transfer of power. After all, Denmark was an elective monarchy at the time. The idea that anyone can be king introduces the instability of competition between eligible people (even if it often ended up being the previous ruler’s heir).
• The person embodying the role of the king is insignificant to people’s daily lives and they’re just happy to have a party.

Let’s pause to take a look at the first possible interpretation of the court’s happiness: that Claudius was a better king than Old Hamlet (our protagonist’s father). There is actually quite a bit of evidence in Shakespeare’s writing to suggest that this may be the case!

For one, Claudius does seem to embody the Machiavellian ideal of a good king. Like Machiavelli suggests in The Prince, Claudius seizes power ruthlessly and

either the court of England or the rule of the Old King that came before. The fact that people are so quickly to move could be a sign that the court is full of sycophants who are performing happiness for the sake of the new king Claudius. On the other and his violence against his brother is, as Machiavelli advises, ‘so severe that his vengeance need not be feared’. Old Hamlet died, after all, so Claudius had no reason to fear any retaliation from him.

Claudius’s evil deeds fit into what Machiavelli argues is the more sustainable, less damaging form of violence:

…applied at one blow and are necessary to one’s security, and that are not persisted in afterwards unless they can be turned to the advantage of the subjects.

Niccoló Machiavelli, The Prince

Claudius does, indeed, perform his cruel act in ‘one blow’. He does an evil deed by killing his brother. After that, though, his actions are much more diplomatic than violent. He tries to get Denmark out of a war with Fortinbras by sending letters and communicating with people instead of ‘multiplying’ his cruelty – which Machiavelli has a problem with.

Then, when he continues evil deeds in the future, it’s easy to argue that they’re ‘turned to the advantage of the subjects’: if he dies, it will bring instability to Denmark in a time when Fortinbras is just waiting for an opportunity to pounce. And who is going to take over from him? Hamlet? The man who may or may not have gone mad? Who is misanthropic and melancholic? Does it seem like Hamlet would be a good king?

But also, let’s think back to what we know about Hamlet’s father. People recognise the Ghost at least in part because of his ‘armour’. Consider the semantic field of the words used to describe him:

• usurp’st
• warlike
• march
• stalks
• armour
• angry parle
• smote
• martial stalk
• combat
• valiant
• seized
• conqueror
• vanquisher
• armèd

These words fit quite firmly into the semantic field of war. A ‘parle’ (we spell it ‘parley’ now) is a truce that happens in the middle of a war so that negotiations can happen. The adjective ‘valiant’ is usuallt reserved to praise the bravery of people who enage in combat. And on top of that, the word ‘stalk’ is repeated, adding an element of zomorphism to descriptions of the Old King by alluding to a predatory animal.

Let’s look at the idea of the ‘angry parle’ again:

So frowned he once when, in an angry parle,

He smote the sledded Polacks on the ice.

Hamlet, Act One Scene One

So according to Marcellus, the Old King was in the middle of a truce with Poland and killed (‘smote’) them because he was angry? Not only does that go against Machiavelli’s suggestion that violence should decrease over time, but it is also just immoral for most audiences – both now and at the time when Shakespeare was writing.

It holds up, doesn’t it? Since Claudius did inherit a conflict with Fortinbras of Poland that was started by his brother, the Old King. Fortinbras is seeking revenge precisely because Hamlet’s father ‘smote’ him when they were supposed to be negotiating, not because of anything Claudius did. So the Old King’s actions plunged the country into conflict. His legacy is one of war, not stability.

Hamlet doesn’t even paint a different picture of his father. He doesn’t suggest that the Ghost is a good king. Yes, he does say his father was an ‘excellent’ king, but all his praise for the Old King centres on his behaviour as a man, not as a ruler:

so loving to my mother

That he might not beteem the winds of heaving

Visit her face too roughly.

Hamlet, Act One Scene Two

In other words, Hamlet is more focused on the goodness of the king’s body natural, rather than whether or not his body politic acted as a king should.

The Ghost also does suggest that he was prone to taking regular naps during the day in the garden, which some perceive as a sense of laziness. I’m not sure I buy that, but it could be something you argue based on the idea of the Protestant Work Ethic that was starting to rear its head during Shakespeare’s time.

Bringing this all back to the National Theatre (2025) version of Hamlet, I think that by making Hamlet the only person not enthusiastic about the coronation of Claudius, they’re saying interesting things about how skewed Hamlet’s view of the court really is. Perhaps he’s the only one who saw his father as a good man.

It’s important to remember that Hamlet has just returned from his studies in Wittenberg, so he wasn’t really around recently to see the how his father ruled. We don’t know how long Hamlet has been out there studying, but arguably, he has quite a childish view of his father.

And why should we believe Hamlet that his parents’ relationship was a successful one, anyway? What young person truly knows about the marriage strains of their families until it blows up in fights or divorce, anyway? He’s been away from court for a while! So why should we listen to a son about whether or not his father made his mother happy? Especially when he’s mourning his father? Most people exaggerate the good qualities of loved ones in grief!

If you consider all of that, it makes a lot more sense why Hamlet is the only one not singing the jovial St Valentines song in this performance of the play. To me, it signifies that Hamlet is viewing his father through rose-tinted glasses, and that he is the odd one out in thinking that the death of the Old King – who threw Denmark into conflict – was a tragedy.

For everyone else, one of the first things Claudius announces as the new king is that he is going to try to find a diplomatic solution to the confict with Fortinbras. He displays kindness and wisdom towards Laertes, and seems to honour the Old King in his speech. What would the problem be? Is that why Gertrude is so surprised by Hamlet’s grief? Is it because she has no reason to mourn her late husband? If Hamlet’s father really was so good to his mother, why is Hamlet the only one questioning her marrying so quickly? Were they expecting her to remarry because they saw things in he previous marriage that Hamlet, as a son, was blind to?

Well, there is one other person who questions the quick marriage: Hamlet’s ally in the court, Horatio. However, he, like Hamlet, hasn’t lived in the court of Elsinore recently. So, there’s no way for him to know if Hamlet’s father had been a good king up until his death. So, unlike Hamlet, Horatio focuses more on how quickly Gertrude got married, rather than comparing Claudius to the Old King.

But there is another aspect to Hamlet standing out compared to everyone else: the countercultural aspect. Hiran Abeysekara’s Hamlet has black nail polish on his nails, which is still not typical of men in our soceity. As things stand in the Western world in the 21st century, a man painting his nails is associated with two different things: blurring the boundaries of gender expectations or being a member of a subculture such as emos or goths that are specifically supposed to stand out and be different to the norm. It could be both!

For people who belong to these kinds of subcultures such as emos and goths, it is often a political thing as well as a means of self-expression. They are saying something by dressing in a way that’s not typical of their societies. Often, they’re not trying to draw attention to themselves. It’s not as simple as performance or wanting people to notice you and direct their attention to you. Rather, it’s more about signifying that you’re different silently – in a way that doesn’t need you to communicate or be at the centre of attention for people to notice.

And I would argue it’s similar for this version of Hamlet. His mannerisms and quietness suggest that he doesn’t want to be addressed publicly, but his choice to paint his nails and (later) dress differently from the rest of the court suggests that he wants people to know that he feels like an outsider to the court mentality. He’s signifying his mental isolation from the rest of Elsinore through his fashion.

The ‘too solid/sullied flesh’ speech is delivered during a freeze frame

In the original text of Hamlet, our titular protagonist delivers the ”O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt’ soliloquy once everyone has left the audience chamber and he is on his own.

In my opinion, performing the speech in this way as Shakespeare intended gives the impression that Hamlet has been emotionally holding himself together throughout the rest of the scene. Yes, he is arguably sarcastic and scornful in his responses to his mother and his uncle, particularly when he says ‘A little more than kin, and less than kind’. However, there is nothing to suggest that Hamlet is on the brink of a mental breakdown until everyone leaves. It’s almost like he’s able to be stoic and calm with other people around.

This gives us the idea from very early on that Hamlet is able to perform for other people. He’s able to separate his internal reality from his external appearance, showing people only the parts of him that he wants them to see.

Info: Did you notice that I wrote both ‘solid’ and ‘sullied’ in the heading for this section? That’s because there are actually multiple different sources for the original text of Hamlet, which use different words here! The first two sources said ‘sallied’ while the later version said ‘solid’. Personally, I think the latter ‘solid’ sounds a lot more suicidal! Find out more in this YouTube video. Personally, I’m using ‘solid’ because I follow the Cambridge School Shakespeare edition of the text (this is an affiliate link).

The fact that Hamlet only fully breaks down when he’s alone makes us question the extent of his mental health problems from the start. This isn’t the only time when he’s able to cater his performance of mental health to his audience (or lack of audience). We Hamlet adjust like this again in his ostentatious performance of madness later on in his ‘fishmonger’ exchange with Polonius. And then he jokingly tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, ‘I am but mad north-north-west.’ In other words, he is able to display this madness in specific circumstances.

Can someone truly be mad if they can adjust their levels of madness for different audiences like that? I mean, he’s clearly going through mental anguish. He’s alone in this section of the scene, so he’s probably his most honest. And in that moment, he’s saying he wants his flesh to melt! That sounds a lot like he wishes he wasn’t on this planet anymore.

But for me, at least, being suicidal or wishing you could disappear is not the same as being mad in the Shakespearean sense of the word. It’s not the same as delusions or erratic behaviour.

And since he’s able to hold in these suicidal feelings until everyone leaves, Hamett’s behaviour in the original text the resembles masking that a neurodivergent person might do. He’s putting on a persona of being okay, which shows that he’s even more alienated from the people around him. It’s almost like he’s been holding a breath the whole time that he’s been in the presence of other people and he can finally let it out.

By contrast, this National Theatre (2025) version of Hamlet changes the context of when the soliloquy is delivered. Instead of Hamlet being alone on stage to reveal his inner thoughts, he does so in the middle of a freeze-frame: all the other characters are frozen in place and he’s the only one moving and expressing himself.

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That really makes us question his mental state from the very start. Can someone truly be mad if they cater their level of madness for different audiences? Yes, he’s clearly going through mental anguish, but that doesn’t translate to madness.

It also ties interestingly in to his more ostentatious performance of madness later on in the ‘fishmonger’ scene when he’s talking to Polonius. The original text shows us from the very start that Hamlet is able to perform a kind of calmness that doesn’t match his inner reality. So, it makes sense for us to question when he truly becomes mad, or if we can say he really ever became mad at all.

Hamlet regularly breaks the fourth wall

Polonius is portrayed as a good father

You can’t see the Ghost in the bedchamber scene

At the beginning of the play, we can see the Ghost – the man that we presume to be Hamlet’s father.

Hamlet doesn’t realise there’s a gun in his hand

The actor who plays the Ghost also plays the Player King

This is known as theatrical doubling (but in the exam, you can simply refer to it as ‘doubling’).

Gertrude is, arguably, the only character who experiences a positive change arc

Next steps

Watching Hamlet (National Theatre, 2025)

Reasons to watch the version even after reading the guide:

• So my analysis makes sense. You can place it in its context and see exactly what I mean.
• You might come up with your own interpretations that I’ve missed. I’ll happily add those to the guide if they come up.
• It helps with memory. This guide is long and has a lot of information in it. Dual coding means if you watch and read the guide, it makes it easier for revision.
• You might disagree with me! Then you could have alternate interpretations about an alternate interpretation, which makes your essay richer.
• It also helps you remember the text for your own revision. The more times you watch it, the more you’ll remember what happens and when. It makes revising quotes much easier.
• The language makes sense if you see people performing it with emotions. Shakespeare’s language isn’t easy otherwise!
• There are plenty of other things I didn’t include in this resource. Otherwise it would be a dissertation! So there are plenty of other things such as emphasis on specific words that you might want to pick up on.

Generally, this guide works best if it’s read in tandem with watching the performance.

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