(Narrator) William Shakespeare's famous work
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark,
is a tragedy written around the year 1600.
The central themes of the play are existential
questions, mental illness and betrayal.
Director Kevin Black sets Hamlet in modern society
that's ruled by artificial intelligence systems,
interrogating our relationships to technology and one another.
(David) Come! Bring me his drink!
Anything happen before that? No This pearl is thine!
(Kevin) Our sovereign.
What a gift. Unbelievable.
Shakespeare made a point of saying that
every step Hamlet took was a potentially lethal one
because his uncle knew Hamlet was not on his side.
What that meant in Shakespeare's version was a ton of spying.
So that's a 400 year old theme in the piece.
But that's not really the only thing
I'm asking us to take a little longer look at,
but using media to interrogate media
and how is a lot of really ramped up
reshaping of information coming through the Internet.
(Kevin as Hamlet) An unprofitable
to me seem all the uses of this world
Fie on't! Oh fie fie!
Tis an unweeded garden that grows things
rank and gross in nature possess it merely.
(David) I think Shakespeare was writing about humanity
within certain
constraints, emotional constraints,
socio political constraints, economic constraints.
And what we do in that case.
Humanity under certain pressures will do terrifying things.
We're seeing ourselves in this older piece
through kind of a patina of contemporary dress,
and we're looking at that way to see these issues
that apply to us then, now and forever.
(Nikki) Very similar characters you're seeing played out in
real life, what's going on in the Ukraine
and the political threat to their democracy.
And I think in our election six years ago,
there's similarities between Trump and Claudius.
Both don't care about the rule of law
and are more concerned about their own political power.
(David) It's so easy to manufacture
the narrative of evil.
We're good over here.
Over there is evil.
I mean, we're seeing that, unfortunately,
fallout on our cameras, 24 seven now.
That just reinforces your own narrative.
So the ideas are pretty eternal.
And you can put these ideas of totalitarianism,
of the authoritarian state, of corrupt
leadership, of mental illness,
and they'll always continue to apply.
(Nikki) That's what's frightening, is that history
does repeat itself.
And if you're not familiar with the past,
you're going to repeat it, you know?
And it's like we're seeing this all over again.
(Zelensky)The question for us
now is to be or not to be.
Oh, no, this Shakespearean question
for 15 days, this question could have been asked.
But now I can give you a definitive answer.
It's definitely yes to be.
(Kevin) The fact that
President Zelensky quoted
Hamlet to Parliament is pretty strong testament
to how the piece
still tragically speaks to us in moments like that,
when a president is desperately trying to hold onto his country
and keep his people safe
and there's an existential threat,
and to find that the way to address that publicly is through
what Shakespeare was writing.
It's very powerful to realize that those
words work... Now.
(Kevin as Hamlet) Now, the wise men know well enough
what monsters you make of us.
to a nunnery go and quickly too. Farewell.
(Kevin) There was a word that
was used a lot in Shakespeare's day,
and actually it was considered a sort of a diagnosis.
It was called melancholy.
And that probably parallels pretty thoroughly nowadays
with our modern diagnosis of depression.
(Nikki as Ophelia) God have mercy on their souls.
And of all Christian souls,
(Nikki) The topics of mental health often come up
throughout the play.
I think our society,
we still shy away from that or we ignore it.
And that goes back into media and what we're watching
constantly on our phones.
It's polluting the minds of these young people as well.
(Kevin) This sort of rolling, continuing
refinement and complexity
of data driven technology, we're also sharing
a ton of information about ourselves,
and that gets to be very dicey because who's on the other end?
(David as Claudius) The King
drinks to Hamlet!
(David) States, kingships, countries, religions, any group
that needs to organize around, you know, American politics.
And the whole comment years ago
with, well, we have alternative facts.
It's difficult because eventually you are being fed
this thing designed to corral you into one way of thinking
(Video Narrator) and a real tribute to the unification
of our sovereign has brought to the nation.
He's a nation builder.
A lover of the people.
(Kevin) It's definitely a very intense
family story. And generationally
and and their struggles to try to come together
in a very, very inhospitable environment.
In another way,
we're dealing with things that you might think about
actually when you get a bit older,
which is what is this all about?
[laughs]
Why? Why are we here?
And I think he's got a number of moments on stage
where he's not only grappling with the difficulties
of the very lethal environment he's in,
but simply like, should I stay or should I go?
To be or not to be?
One of the reasons
we keep going back to that play is it's wildly entertaining,
but it also it's not very generous with answers.
The play asks you questions
and you start working your way through a series of thoughts,
and it's a picture of people
having to work their way through isolation.
And what do you do?
You start
wondering about existence and coming to some conclusions.