Set in a crumbling hierarchical empire, HAMLET. A VERSION shifts the usual focus from the iconic philosophical title character to the intrigue, opportunism, and political scheming of a burgeoning police state.
This starkly realized new world order, insidiously ushered in by murderous and destabilizing tactics, provides a whole new meaning to the phrase
‘something is rotten in the state of Denmark.’

From a curiously flat-footed Hamlet and a self-aggrandizing ‘Polonius the First’, to the questionable death of the old king and a torrid affair between Gertrude and Claudius, Boris Akunin’s HAMLET. A VERSION provides a radically prescient perspective on a contemporary political issue: how to eradicate the old to make way for the new.
But who gets caught in the crossfire?

It takes some guts to rewrite what is possibly the most revered play of all time: Hamlet. Even when Tom Stoppard played around with Shakespeare’s masterpiece in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, he didn’t mess with the original dialogue, but built around it. In Hamlet. A Version (directed by Irina Gachechiladze), Boris Akunin has no such reservations. Akunin, widely known in Russia for his works of detective fiction, doesn’t entirely discard Shakespeare’s original, retaining a line or two here and there, and keeping mainly to the original plot – but nor does he stubbornly follow the text. Akunin reworks Hamlet to such a degree that it becomes a new story, with new dialogue, new characterizations, and new takeaways. You might expect a rewrite of Hamlet to be disappointing, totally pointless, and not worth your time. And, prior to seeing Akunin’s Hamlet. A Version, I probably would have agreed with you. But we would both be wrong. Akunin’s script is dazzling, and his new (or should we say alternate?) Hamlet is a breathtaking journey: full of wit, humor, tragedy, and twists. If you go in expecting to see a purist staging of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, you might be disappointed. But if …Read more