When Jenni from MSC called me to ask if I could fill a gap that suddenly arrived in their season I instantly wrote back with “how about Hamlet?”, a little later on I remembered that the great Trevor Nunn famously said “You don’t direct Hamlet, you survive it”. 

 

Well, I’m still here and it's thanks to the spirit of the company you will meet tonight. Hamlet is famously the personal Everest for most directors and although I have wrestled some large classics into the arena of action and experience before, this one has tested every lesson I have ever learned.

 

Like no other, this particular play asserts itself on you. It integrates itself into your being and then it rejects anything that is extra to the idea of the play;  clever add ons, extra textual interpretations, a “message” (yawn). Hamlet works on you in a way I have only ever experienced working on Harold Pinter. It  feels like taking a hero dose. It has shattered my ego, probably beyond repair but it has also (very generously) filled that painful void in my artistic soul with something immeasurably more valuable… open hearted communion with all those around me corruscating in grief and joy.

 

 Like most directors beginning a show I began the process brimming with a million clever ideas for staging and interpretation, “it's all about invisible power”, “it's a veiled exploration of the arrival of surveillance under Francis Walsingham, and Wiliam Cecil!”, “it's the deep state!” the list goes on … but I have ended up essentially with only one idea: Passionate communion. My job has been to get out of the way and to act as midwife to this wonderful transcendent text and to these very special vocational actors. To let the stagecraft inherent in the writing build a bridge between the humans on the stage and you humans in the audience. It's a lesson I started learning with Darren Gilshenan (who drove down from Brisbane to gift us his Polonius tonight) and Christopher Stollery (from Thirroul for the Ghost) over 20 years ago working on Thornton Wilder’s Our Town at The Opera House and it's a lesson I am grateful to continue to learn with you and with this company tonight on Hamlet.

 

The actors you will see tonight are all vocational artists in the mediaeval sense of the word. They follow a calling. They are doing it for you for essentially nothing (a 25 way profit share in an indie venue) on a budget that is visibly less. All of them have well established careers, all of them can command serious fees if they choose and none of them give a tinker's damn about anything other than building that bridge to you tonight marvellously propelled by the words of a fellow vocational artist: the applause, the delight, the wonder of our stage, gentle William Shakespeare.

 

— Iain Sinclair