"Full of intrigue... lush and fantastical." - The New York Times

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"Probably the most intriguing version of Hamlet I have ever seen!" - Times Square Chronicles

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Red Lab, in association with Roust Theatre Company and executive producer Mark Mullen, presents Boris Akunin’s HAMLET. A VERSION. This world premiere by the celebrated Georgian-born writer and dissident of Putin’s Russia, internationally famous for the cycle of fictional detective novels The Adventures of Erast Fandorin, re-engineers Shakespeare’s classic tragedy in an ingeniously innovative vein. Directed by Irina Gachechiladze, with compositions by Giya Kancheli.

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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?

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