Today, we inaugurate a new genre of posts, jumping into the theatre universe with the character playlist! Let’s discover together my choices for the character of Hamlet, dark and passionating almost antihero from the eponym play by William Shakespeare.

Firstly, who is Hamlet? That’s the question. When he asks it himself with the famous ‘to be or not to be’, he gives us to see only the emerged part of the iceberg. The Danish Prince, Hamlet The Dane, is a complex being and more rational than we think in the first reading. He seems mad, but if you think him sincerely mad, then like his uncle and his mother, you don’t listen to him enough.

It’s very easy to be emphatic with this troubled man going through depression. Very progressively, he evolves in front of our eyes, passing from depression to reflection, to anger, then murder before coming back to regrets, forgiveness… or almost… until death. We found in his speeches all of grief’s stages and more.

That’s for all these reasons, and many more, that the playlist of an hour I propose today is tainted with some sort of melancholy, a sadness, a touch of madness sometimes but also of much much love. Because Hamlet is a play full of it. Whether it is familial or passionate, full of resentment or of regrets, falling sometimes into hate, love is always present in the lines of the longest play of the Bard.

The playlist 👇

And if you want to go further than the music, here are some works to devour:

• Hamlet, WS – directed by Gregory Doran – RSC – 2009
• Hamlet, WS – directed by David Bobée (French) – 2010
• Hamlet, WS – translation of Pascal Collin – 2010
• Srsly Hamlet, WS – Emoji reinterpretation of Courtne Carbone – 2015