The Brooklyn Rail

We all know the ghost in Hamlet—the murdered King of Denmark whose specter sets the tragic events of the play in motion. But actor Hiran Abeysekera and director Robert Hastie had more to contend with than just the old king’s ghost with their production of Shakespeare’s tragedy, which arrives at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on April 19. It’s not just Hamlet, the character, who’s haunted by the past, but the actor and the director as well; they are both grappling with legendary predecessors from the past.

The quick-paced, contemporary take on the more than four-hundred-year-old play premiered last fall at London’s National Theatre, under the leadership of Director and Co-Chief ExecutiveIndhu Rubasingham, the first woman and person of color to run the five-decade-old institution. Abeysekera, a Sri Lankan-born, London-based actor, brings a distinctive blend of volatility and cheeky humor to the title role. He won the 2022 Olivier Award for his performance in Life of Pi, later reprising his celebrated performance on Broadway. Brooklyn audiences may also remember him in The Prisoner, directed by the late theater visionary Peter Brook. Hastie, who became Deputy Artistic Director at the National last year, is currently represented on Broadway with his production of the hit British musical Operation Mincemeat.

Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, took place over Zoom in February and spanned three time zones, with Abeysekera on a break in his native Sri Lanka and Hastie in England rehearsing his upcoming revival of Maxim Gorky’s Summerfolk at the National.

Gerard Raymond (Rail): How did this production of Hamlet come about?

Robert Hastie: I’d seen Hiran in a number of things before, but really watching him play Pi—the relationship that he had with the audience in that part—made me think if I ever get to do Hamlet, that's the kind of relationship I think Hamlet should have with the audience. And many years later, when I began conversations with Indhu about opening her tenure at the National Theatre with a production of Shakespeare, we thought immediately about doing Hamlet because it has such a strong connection to the start of the National. I said to her that I'd always wanted to see Hiran play the part, and Indhu, who had worked with him recently, immediately saw the potential of that.

Rail: Hiran, how did you feel about taking on this iconic role?

Abeysekera: My first thoughts: are you sure you want me to play it? And yeah, then excitement. Also, a fear of am I able to do it? It stayed like that until we started rehearsals. Then the question of can you do it became more and more profound, and louder. But weirdly, as soon as the audience started coming in, they gave me more confidence. As Rob was saying, it's such an interesting connection we have with the audience—questioning if they see the things that you're seeing or feeling the things that you're feeling. Yeah, even the question of am I losing my mind: you're my only hope, tell me!

Rail: Rob, you mentioned the tradition of Hamlet at the National, which began with Laurence Olivier’s 1963 production starring Peter O’Toole. In addition to all the distinguished Hamlets that have made a mark at the National, your production now comes to BAM, where previous productions of Hamlet have been directed by the likes of Ingmar Bergman and Peter Brook. How weighty is the prospect of continuing this lineage?

Hastie: It was a huge pressure. I think one of the ways that we dealt with that was by acknowledging it. The ghosts of the past are quite literally present in Hamlet. Hamlet himself is feeling the pressure of previous generations in the play, so we thought we should use that. We enjoy the fact that the pressure of previous generations on Hamlet the man is also the pressure on Hamlet the production, and everybody who's making it. The size of that, and the fame of what's gone before, is part of what's putting the characters under pressure at the start of the play.

Rail: Did you have a particular take or vision when you began work on the play?

Hastie: What's a pithy way of answering this? No, I mean you can’t, because the play itself is so complex. I think the point is every Hamlet will always be defined by the person playing the part. So we started from what will Hiran bring to this role? For me, it was always about that connection with the audience. Hiran has an incredibly direct, mischievous, confrontational, warm, sympathetic connection with an audience in a theater. He has this ability to make an audience lean in and listen, want to spend time with him and get to know him. He's an incredible stage creature—he always looks at home on any stage you drop him on. I think this must be one of the things that Peter Brook saw in him when they discussed doing Hamlet.

Hamlet is a terribly self-aware play. It's full of metaphors about the theater, about acting, about performance, and about pretense. We had this sort of mantra that Hamlet knows he's in a play—kind of like Deadpool knows he's in a film. That is a flippant way of defining it but there's a speech halfway through in which Hamlet says, “I’ve heard that guilty creatures sitting at a play” and he turns to the audience and describes what they're doing in that moment. I don't suppose there's any time in the play's history that it hasn't felt current. Different centuries have found that modernity in different places in the play. For us, I think it is the meta theatricality, the breaking of the fourth wall—that feels like a very contemporary way of connecting with characters in drama.

Abeysekera: Oh my gosh, the Deadpool thing was very present. It is sort of like taking your best buddy on a journey with you and, anything that you see, you want to look at them to see if they've seen it too. Like the ghost—did you see that? There’s that feeling of they're always there trying to share what's happening with me.

Hastie: It got really interesting when we realized that Hamlet is using the audience to kind of validate his experience. Elsinore is a world of deceit, where you’re never quite sure what to trust. And so Hamlet turns to us to give him some sense of objective reality. We actually found some really fascinating moments where he turns to us for that help in grounding himself, and he doesn't get it because what he's experiencing is not quite the same as what we're experiencing, or he's behaving in a way that we can't quite endorse. So when he turns to us to recruit us to be his ally when he's behaving erratically or dangerously and doesn't get the full support he's asking for, that destabilizes him even further.

Rail: May we take a minute to talk about Francesca Mills? Her feisty Ophelia is quite a revelation in this production.

Hastie: Yes, absolutely. Fran is an actor who is willing to offer all of herself to the process and to the play. She's incredibly playful, but takes the work very seriously indeed. She—and you, Hiran—both offered each other absolute trust and a lot of silliness right from the first rehearsal. And that's just an incredibly rich, fertile ground to grow in. Everybody knows that every Hamlet is different by virtue of the person playing it. It's so much more powerful—for both Hamlet the play and Hamlet the person—if the people he encounters are real, living, breathing human beings who are impacted by the events. It makes Hamlet's job harder in a really good way if he can't dismiss them as supporting parts. They are each of them living in their own play, for whom Hamlet is a supporting part—for whom Hamlet is an antagonist, an annoyance, for whom Hamlet is an obstacle. And I feel like Hiran really ran with that as an idea.

Rail: Hiran, does being the first Asian, and Sri Lankan, to play Hamlet at the National have any specific meaning for you?

Abeysekera: I think I just feel the same way that anyone given a chance to play Hamlet at the National would feel. However, there were instances when I started getting sort of nervous—you know, whether I’ll do my bit and make people proud, I guess. But I quickly put away those thoughts because—it's what Rob was talking about finding it as a strength, all these great actors playing [the role] before. Chris, a friend of mine, and I were talking about Buddhism and the mantras [incantations], and how the different sounds of the gathas and sutras [verses and scriptures]—these vibrations—how they exist in different strata, and how they hold power. Whenever somebody utters them they would connect to that strata of energy and receive that power. If words have power like that, Shakespeare—Hamlet—which has been spoken for more than 400 years by people, does that also exist in a particular sort of energy field? And when we speak it do we connect to it? That was one of those late night conversations around the dinner table which gave me a lot of comfort! To not feel the pressure of having to prove myself amongst other actors who have played Hamlet, but to feel connected to them now. That actually feels quite cool.

Hastie: The only thing I would add to that, Hiran, is you were very clear from the beginning with me that you didn’t really want this just to be a Hamlet set in Sri Lanka because you're Sri Lankan.

Abeysekera: Yes, that’s true.

Hastie: Which is not to say that all of your protected characteristics aren’t part of the world that we made. Playing Hamlet asks so much of the actor in terms of the depths of emotion and history that we're asking them to mine. If you started from a place of considering doing a voice anything other than your own, you're setting up a very foolish barrier. Hiran is, as you know, an exceptional, RADA-trained, classical actor. We all feel very happy that we’re now a culture which doesn't require Shakespeare to be spoken in a specific and, actually, culturally very narrow way, to release the poetry of it and make sense of it.

Rail: Considering the famous Hamlets that have come before you at the National, Hiran, it’s interesting to remember Daniel Day Lewis, whose intense approach to the role affected him so viscerally that he quit a performance never to return to the stage again. By contrast, you have described Hamlet as something like a stand-up comic, and you bring humor not typically associated with the role.

Abeysekera: I mean, it's all kind of there, isn't it? Truthfully, if a similar thing happened to me—I remember my mum once saying when we were going through a bit of a hard time—if at any point you can laugh at what's going on, you're going to be okay. I realize, more and more, that’s how I deal with things. It's not trying to lighten it, it's just trying to get through without breaking down completely. Sometimes laughter is the only sort of crutch that you have.

Rail: It’s no surprise that the production is costumed in modern dress, but I have to ask about Hamlet’s Blockbuster Video sweater...

Hastie: [Laughing] This might sound really flippant, but that came from the same place of saying how to do it in your own voice. Ben Stones, our set and costume designer, had done some really brilliant designs for what Hiran might wear formally at the beginning of the play for the funeral/wedding and for when he comes back from England, for the fencing match. But we were struggling with, What's Hamlet wearing when he's wandering about the court when he’s just himself? Hiran came into rehearsal one day wearing a Blockbuster sweater and we just went—he should wear that! Obviously, we then did some thought about what it means for him to be wearing something that is sort of nostalgic and defunct. And we could justify all of the reasons why Hamlet might attach himself to something that felt kind of retro cool, and for a technology that no longer exists. Then somebody also pointed out that there's a scene in the famous Ethan Hawke Hamlet in which he's in a Blockbuster Video store. That was not intentional, but again, those meta-theatrical hands reached out across time and space, and I think, in this production, that doesn't feel inappropriate.