In 2010 a National Youth Theatre cast premiered Michael Lesslie’s prequel to Hamlet Prince of Denmark at the National Theatre. This autumn the NYT REP Company will be performing Prince of Denmark at the Ambassadors Theatre. Below Nathan FitzPatrick talks to Michael about writing a Shakespeare prequel, how Prince of Denmark helps students understand Hamlet and why Shakespeare’s still relevant today.  

Nathan: Whose story is Prince of Denmark?

Michael: What got me initially excited about the play was telling Laertes’s story. Hamlet himself is such a central figure in our minds, but reading the play I realised that all of the characters have the same dilemmas as him, so I wanted to give each of them an interior moment. It’s key to me that Osric has a little soliloquy, and that you get to see Ophelia saying, “I’m being manipulated by all these men and it drives me nuts.” What I wanted to do was tell the real story of the private moments in the world of Elsinor. So I have to say it started off as Laertes’s story but it became everyone’s.

Nathan: In what ways do you feel that the characters are specifically different from their future selves?

Michael: Starting with Hamlet, I think the question that we’ve had in every audition is, “In Hamlet he seems to love his father, but in Prince of Denmark he really doesn’t, what’s that about?” I started research into the background of Hamlet, and there’s this scene describing how King Hamlet was away all the time fighting wars; I realised that the reality of being the young Hamlet would be that you’d never see your dad. The love that is expressed in Hamlet struck me as the kind of love where underneath he’s saying “I never got to say goodbye.” What was exciting for me was being able to show that earlier resentment in the younger Hamlet. Laertes I think remains quite similar, in that he’s bitter and he’s popular, but I wanted to show what’s not really shown about him in Hamlet. So I’d say Laertes and Ophelia are both different in that we get to see the private moments, we actually see what is implicit in Hamlet. Everything in Prince of Denmark is very much grounded in the reality that’s posed in Hamlet. I’d say Hamlet’s character is the one that seems to change most between the two plays, but everyone’s actually quite consistent.

Nathan: Missing characters, why?

Michael: On a practical, commissioning level, we wanted this to be a play in which young actors could play their own age; there’s a sense of reality to that and for me that’s quite important. Prince of Denmark is set a very hierarchical world where the characters are always being watched, there’s this sense of unseen authority always looming above them. So you’re exploring a repressed generation within a repressive society but also showing how their young group mirrors the social strata of the older society. It’s microcosmic and I think that’s underlined by the youth of the characters.

Nathan: Is Prince of Denmark a tragedy?

Michael: It would depend how you define tragedy; if you’re taking a pretty structural and formulaic view then it’s not. I do think that the structure of someone whose fatal flaw is in them from the beginning is there, so Hamlet’s failure to live up to what he wants to be definitely has a tragic arc to it. What I feel is that the end of Prince of Denmark sets up what happens in Hamlet so I definitely think it’s kind of a preparation for tragedy. This is a very reductive answer, but I also want it to a lot of fun, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are such obviously funny people. I was in Hamlet at school and I remember the director saying to me that the thing about tragedy is that if you speed it up it’s a farce. That’s an aphorism but at the same time if you played the end of Hamlet in fast-forward it is a bit like that. So we get to explore some of those elements.

Nathan: What ways do you think this could help students understand Hamlet?

Michael: I was in a few Shakespeare plays at school and that really brought it to life: realising that behind these very dense and complex grammatical structures it was people, this was a play for performance. I wanted to write a play that people could get up and do and feel. I would hope that Prince of Denmark is a slightly less intimidating opener to Hamlet because all the themes are similar: if you’re interested in any of the themes in Prince of Denmark, they’re all in Hamlet, done better to the nines. I think the register is also key in that it’s more formal than the way we speak now but at the same time it’s got to be in the natural rhythms of speech. There are moments of the play that are deliberately constructed in iambic prose to echo Hamlet, but at the same time I wanted the play to naturalise Shakespearian language. One of the things Anthony (Banks, who’s directing Prince of Denmark for the second time) and I have done in both productions, and that we’re really happy with, has been having the actors use their own accents, and not doing the Received Pronunciation Shakespeare we’re all used to.

Nathan: Do you think Shakespeare’s still relevant?

Michael: Yes. I still think, without a shadow of a doubt, that he’s the best playwright I’ve ever come across in the English language; I think he’s still relevant for a whole myriad of reasons. For a start, the political structures that he either uses or suggests aren’t redundant now, aren’t obsolete. Prince of Denmark has a lot of Socialism and Conservatism debates in it but those are all in Hamlet as well. I also think on a basic human level you cannot, for me, find more emotional plays, when that humanity is really played on, I’ve never been as moved in a theatre. Ok, another reductive example, Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet connected with new generations just by a very simple re-contextualisation. It still used all the ‘impenetrable and difficult language,’ but it showed that the simple love story can still connect with people. Shakespeare had such a wide-ranging kind of mind that I think the themes in all his plays still have something to say.

Nathan: Have you had any experiences that really changed the way you viewed theatre?

Michael: I’ve had three experiences like that, all on a level. One was reading Who’s afraid of Virginia Wolfe? in class; our teacher had agreed to let us off an essay on the condition that we spend the rest of term reading through it. So the teacher played George and I had to play Martha, it was so weird but that suddenly just opened that play for me. Another experience was being in All My Sons at university. I was George in that and at that point where Kate slips, and the whole edifice they’ve built their life on crumbles, I remember hearing gasps ripple back through the audience, and that was magic. But the other one, tellingly for me, and that’s the reason I say it last even though it was the first to happen, was reading through Othello in class. It was just this unbelievable moment of seeing that manipulation take place, which obviously influences Prince of Denmark loads. But at the end of that class all of us left the room not being able to speak. I remember looking at the teacher and he looked really down, so we asked if he was ok and his reply was, ‘Yeah, I just realised you will never hear that for the first time in your lives again.’ And it’s true, the first time you hear that drama is amazing.

Prince of Denmark by Michael Lesslie runs between 2 October – 27 November at the Ambassadors Theatre in rep with Romeo + Juliet and Tory Boyz.

Schools discounts are available and tickets can be purchased for matinee performances as a double-bill with Romeo + Juliet. More information and how to book tickets here