Edited and directed by Fiona Laird for a single performer – Mark lockyer – across 90 minutes, Shakespeare’s Hamlet takes on a startling new intensity in The Play’s The Thing. A One Person Hamlet at Wilton’s Music Hall, Tuesday 1 April to Saturday 12 April, 2025.
We see Hamlet’s inner demons as never before. The prince, powerless against a tide of selfishness and injustice, loses his grip on reality. But if he really is mad, then is this story a figment of his broken
imagination, and the other characters merely voices in his head?
Shakespeare’s language sings out – all the timeless phrases we know so well given a new meaning seen through the prism of one soul.
As Hamlet himself says, ‘The Play’s The Thing’.
Mark Lockyer said: “To see Hamlet through the lens of my experiences gives it a unique credence. Like Hamlet, madness was my enemy too. Hamlet never made it. And many others never make it, but I did. The least I can do is tell his story.”
Regeneration’s Hamlet began when Fiona saw Mark playing multiple parts simultaneously in ‘Living With The Lights On’ at the Young Vic Theatre, and was subsequently developed at the National Theatre Studio.
Creative team:
Director Fiona Laird.
Lighting Design Tim Mitchell.
Stage Design Anthony Lamble.
Fiona Laird is a director, writer, composer and lyricist. Her directing credits include The Merry Wives of Windsor at the RSC, Oh What a Lovely War, Guys and Dolls, Peter Pan and Frogs (National Theatre), Stephen Fry’s Cinderella at the Old Vic her own play Beyond Belief in the West End and on Broadway, Twenty Men Singing for the Welsh National Opera, the World Premiere of Arnold Wesker’s Longitude at Greenwich Theatre, Christmas Cracker at the Royal Festival Hall, and Aristophanes’ The Clouds in London, New York, Amsterdam and Delphi.
Mark Lockyer is thought by many to be one of the greatest Shakespearean actors of his age whose theatre credits include major roles in The Alchemist, The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, and The Taming of the Shrew all at the Royal Shakespeare company, Laertes in Hamlet at the Globe (dir. Mark Rylance), Malvolio in Twelfth Night at the Bristol Old Vic, and Good, Theatre of Blood, Bartholemew Fair, and Fuente Ovejuna at the National Theatre.
