Hamlet/Ur-Hamlet cast: It’s best to leave your expectations at the door

Playing with gender roles is another way that can mess with an audience's expectations, like casting a woman in the lead role.

Aysan Celik who plays Hamlet in the production. “Some of the male characters I’ve played are very close to me,” she says. Christopher Pike / The National

One very immediate and effective way to up-end an audience's expectations of theatre is to play with gender roles and it's in that tradition that Aysan Celik, a founding member of Theater Mitu, plays the role of Hamlet in Hamlet/Ur-Hamlet. The company's artistic director Rubèn Polendo explains the decision to cast a woman to lead the production as another point of experimentation. "I am positing the idea that when you do see the character of Hamlet, it is actually inhabited by this actor who is a woman, who is neither playing Hamlet as a woman nor acting like a man playing Hamlet. But even though it sounds very intellectual, an actor who is a woman, playing Hamlet who is a man. So the equation is what does that mean?"

Celik relished the role once she’d given up an almost subconscious feeling of guilt that she was depriving her male peers of the chance to play a character that’s feared and desired in equal measure. Does it matter that Hamlet is a man, I ask? “I’ve done a lot of all-female Shakespeare pieces,” she says. “In those experiences, I’ve really tried to look at who that person is and I do look at where they fall on the spectrum in terms of how masculine or ‘butch’ they are, and some of the male characters I’ve played are very close to me, in fact.”

For Hamlet/Ur-Hamlet, Celik says, she's tried for a more direct response to the words, the ideas they hold and the story "without worrying about gender".

“I think the danger is if I go into putting on this mask of masculinity,” she says, “that will ­obscure my meeting these words with some kind of authenticity.

“Whatever the audience experiences from that I don’t know, but I don’t have any control over that … I’m just imagining that I am him. [In acting] there’s an idea of going out to the character or already having this character within you, and I am trying to look at it from that point of view.”

In putting on Hamlet’s boots, Celik is in good company with the likes of the French stage and early film star Sarah Bernhardt, and the Danish actress Asta Nielsen, who played the prince in a silent film of the play produced in Germany in 1921. That film was based on an essay of literary criticism published by Edward Vining in 1881, in which it’s argued Hamlet has overwhelmingly female characteristics that leave her “desperately striving to fill a place for which she was by nature unfitted”. Nielsen’s Hamlet disguises herself as a man in order to inherit the throne. It’s a compelling performance and one that stands the test of time against a long, long list of well-known actors who have played Hamlet, including Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, Kenneth Branagh, Christopher Plummer and Kevin Kline. Watching footage of these performances was all part of Theater Mitu’s research process for the company’s own interpretation of Hamlet.

"One of the reasons that I love Hamlet," Celik says, "is because it's not the sort of play where you see one actor doing it and then a second and you say 'oh, that second actor is really the perfect type' … You can see this huge variety of actors and their Hamlet, and the language and the story can contain all of them.

“For the rest of my life, I’ll go to productions of Shakespeare plays and I want to see different actors take them on.”

All the performers, male and female play Hamlet/Ur-Hamlet with the help of an earpiece feeding the script directly to them on stage. It's a rather neat and democratising gizmo that reminds the audience that they're watching a performance. As Justin Nestor, who performs in Hamlet/Ur-Hamlet, says: "You as an audience member witness me encountering Hamlet. Actually having to fit myself around it, versus this illusion that for an hour I will be Hamlet and you'll believe that … There is something very interesting about saying: 'No, I'm not that far from you, this little earpiece is the only difference. The only thing that separates you and I.' It makes the actor very human and less grand."

The technology also makes his acting life a little easier because he doesn’t have to memorise swathes of text nor does he have to concentrate on giving a performance – it just has to happen and that juggernaut of words transforms the piece of theatre.

“When that text is coming, you can’t stop it, you don’t have control over the rhythm, the intonation, you’ve just got to go,” Nestor says. “It leaves the text raw in a really interesting way and the performer raw in an interesting way. They lose the grand, crafted performance, but it’s clumsy in a really beautiful way.”