For anything so o'erdone is from the purpose of playing,
whose end, both at the first and now,
was and is to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature.
It's not enough, I think, to do Hamlet and say, "It's a play about a family."
Sure it's a play about a family.
It's not enough to say it's a play about a man's emotional, psychological journey.
Of course it is, but at the centre of the play
is a man desperately concerned with the nature of truth
and desperately concerned with his own ability to be truthful to himself.
In a way, the play is asking, "Is it possible entirely to know oneself?"
As much as it's asking, "Is it possible entirely to know the people around you?"
To make those concerns even more vivid,
the play creates a court where dishonesty
is at the heart of the regime.
The regime is built on the lie that old Hamlet
was killed sleeping in his orchard by a serpent.
The regime is also built on a system of surveillance.
Everybody spies on everybody else.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are brought in to spy on Hamlet.
Polonius spies on Laertes.
Everybody's watching everybody else. Nobody's honest with everybody else.
And the big image of dishonesty is the idea of performance.
Seems, madam?
Nay, it is.
I know not "seems".
But I have that within which passes show.
"Show" is what the court does.
"Show" is Claudius, Gertrude, Elsinore.
Hamlet is constantly trying to get beyond "show" to the truth.
Theatre is a loaded and complex metaphor in the play.
At the beginning of the play, Elsinore is show business - it's showtime!
"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king"
is not just a narrative device.
It's a discovery that, through imagination, through art, you can reach something
that is truer than the thing that it is, apparently, reflecting.
In Shakespeare, almost everything contains its own opposite.
What's interesting is that, gradually, the metaphor flips,
and that you realise that the theatre,
theatricality, "show", "seeming",
which, for Hamlet, are anathema at the beginning of the play,
in the hands of the players, become a weapon to discover the truth.
And the theatre, which starts off as an emblem of everything that's false,
becomes the scalpel that cuts through to reality
in the hands of people who make theatre.
Through The Murder Of Gonzago,
which is a marvellous and really dangerous act of political theatre,
you get the truth about Denmark that the regime isn't itself able to tell.
You shall see anon, how the murderer gets the love of Gonzago's wife.
- The king rises! - What, frighted with false fire?
- How fares my lord? - Give me some light! Away!
Another thing that the theatre is in Hamlet is false at the beginning of the play,
it uncovers the truth in the middle of the play and it's also really dangerous!
It's why I took the decision to end the first half of this production
immediately after the performance of the play,
and to end it on the image of the tragedians of the city
being arrested at gunpoint and taken away.
In the end, it's a play about truth.
It's a play about a remarkable man who wants to be more truthful
than it's probably possible to be, both to himself and the rest of the world,
and who demands of the rest of the world they are that truthful to him.
That is his tragedy.