Robert Icke's acclaimed staging of Hamlet makes its North American premiere in summer 2022 after a run at London's Almeida Theatre. Hamlet tickets will be available on New York Theatre Guide soon.
Hamlet is a play about a young Danish prince whose father has been murdered by his uncle Claudius. Urged on by his father's ghost, Hamlet swears revenge. He hatches a plan to pretend to go mad and kill his uncle in his "madness." However, he becomes all-consumed by his grief and by the idea of mortality, and the line between pretend and real madness blurs. As Hamlet seemingly slips into insanity, multiple other people in the Danish court — like his innocent lover Ophelia, her father Polonius, and his friend Horatio — get brought down as collateral damage.
Icke's production transforms the story into a psychological thriller, focusing even more sharply on Hamlet's mental decay. In London, Icke transformed the world of Hamlet into a noir-inspired Scandinavian surveillance state.
Shakespeare's Hamlet is not only one of his most famous tragedies, but one of the most adapted and celebrated plays of all time. Hamlet has the most film adaptations of any Shakespeare play with more than 50 — a famous example is the movie and musical The Lion King. The show has also gotten countless stage adaptations worldwide, and Icke's production is just one of multiple Shakespeare shows in 2022 New York alone. Uptown from the long-running The Lion King, an opera version of Hamlet is at The Metropolitan Opera from May 13 to June 9, and another renowned Shakespeare tragedy, Macbeth, is having its latest Broadway revival starring Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga.
Icke's Hamlet comes to New York five years after premiering in London's West End. The 2017 production began at the Almeida Theatre and moved to the Harold Pinter Theatre, and a Hamlet review on LondonTheatre.co.uk called the show "Shakespeare lives in the here and now -- but also forever, thanks to a production that will become an instant part of theatrical folklore."
At the Park Avenue Armory, Hamlet will play in repertory with Icke's production of Aeschylus's Oresteia, which won him an Olivier Award, an Evening Standard Theatre Award, and a Critics' Circle Theatre Award for Best Director.
Both shows will feature the same cast and will play in the Armory's Wade Thompson Drill Hall, an enormous and versatile space. It has transformed to host all sorts of classic and modern plays; for example, the space became a Scottish warzone for a Kenneth Branagh-led Macbeth.
Tickets to Hamlet off Broadway will be available soon.
