Hamlet: The prequel
A fool who knows he's a fool. And a fool who doesn't
What could possibly go wrong?
An exiled king seeks revenge on his wicked brother, who has stolen both his kingdom and his wife. He’s banking on the help of his son, Hamlet - the dynamic young prince is just the man to restore his father’s crown.
But the king has just one small problem. He’s dead.
Okay, there’s another problem. Hamlet’s not actually all that dynamic.
Still, a little ghostly intervention can’t hurt, can it? A brief visitation from beyond the grave? What could possibly go wrong?
Waiting for Hamlet joins the king and his equally-deceased companion Yorick as they weigh up the pros and cons of intervening. Or is it interfering?
Languishing in Limbo, they have to decide whether to act, or to take it lying down.
Because life’s not a question of being or not being. It’s much more complicated than that.
productions
Windsor 2018
The first production was directed by Paula Chitty with Edmund Dehn as the King and Elizabeth George as The Fool
Eastbourne 2020
Tim Marriott and Nic Collett performed a work-in-progress reading of the festival-length play at Printers Playhouse on January 28th
Summer 2020
We'll be staging Waiting for Hamlet at theatre, literary and Shakespeare festivals from May, leading up to Edinburgh in August.
the players
The King: Tim Marriott
The Fool: Nicholas Collett
The Writer: David Visick
David grew up in Eastbourne. He has worked as a teacher, a journalist and a communications director and has written two books, Farrow and Ball will be Named in our Divorce and Vanity Mirror. For ten years he wrote a blog, My Homework Ate the Dog, and won the Word Magazine Blog of The Year award in 2012. Waiting for Hamlet, which won the 2018 International Kenneth Branagh New Drama Writing Award at the Windsor Fringe, was his first play. He’s since written three more, A Play on Words, Absolutely Everything and The Leavers.
"VERY CLEVER, FUNNY AND SKILLFULLY WRITTEN”
Project Whamlet
Waiting for Hamlet won its writer David Visick the International Kenneth Branagh New Drama Writing Award in 2018. The judges described it as “born from a love of the source material and an equal love of Stoppard-esque wordplay,” and “very clever, funny and skillfully written.”
It was first performed at the Windsor Fringe in October 2018 and is presented this year as an extended 50-minute one-act two-hander.
Waiting for Hamlet Part II (the sequel to the prequel) is being prepared for performances in 2021. It continues the adventures of the King and the Fool as they observe and take part in the action in Shakespeare's Hamlet. Its cast of six play all the characters from the original.
The premiere performance of both parts together is planned for later this year.