Riz Ahmed stalks through a contemporary London at war with itself in a searing new take on Shakespeare’s most haunted prince. In this radical reimagining of Hamlet,the Danish court is recast as a fractured modern city,its corridors of power replaced by shadowy alleyways,neon-lit underpasses and anonymous glass towers.The Guardian’s review of this production charts how Ahmed’s intensely vulnerable, psychologically raw performance anchors a staging that brings the tragedy startlingly close to home-turning a 400-year-old play into a chilling mirror of urban alienation, political mistrust and private grief.
Riz Ahmed’s visceral Hamlet performance redefines the tortured prince for a new generation
Threading his way through London’s nocturnal sprawl, Ahmed turns Shakespeare’s most overexamined psyche into something raw, present and dangerously alive. His delivery toggles between murmured confession and sudden, explosive rage, as if the language itself were being improvised in the moment rather than inherited from the canon. The camera’s restless tracking shots keep him in motion-through underpasses, kebab shops, quiet housing estates-so that revenge feels less like a courtly duty and more like a fever that refuses to break. Around him, police sirens, flickering shopfronts and late‑night buses replace Elsinore’s stone walls, and his haunted gaze suggests a man trapped not in a castle but in a city that never grants true darkness or escape.
This iteration reframes alienation in terms that feel urgently contemporary, using the textures of urban Britain to expose fractures in class, race and power. Ahmed leans into the character’s instability with a precision that feels almost forensic: the pauses are as revealing as the soliloquies, and his shifting physicality-hunched shoulders on an estate stairwell, squared jaw under harsh fluorescent light-maps a mind fraying under surveillance and expectation. Around him, supporting characters are drawn with minimalist strokes that highlight their complicity and distance:
- Gertrude as a weary matriarch negotiating respectability politics.
- Claudius as a media‑savvy operator fluent in corporate spin.
- Ophelia as a young woman swallowed by institutional indifference.
| Element | Modern Echo |
|---|---|
| Ghost scenes | Urban CCTV glow |
| Royal court | Boardrooms and backrooms |
| Madness | Trauma in plain sight |
Urban London as Elsinore how contemporary streetscapes intensify Shakespearean tragedy
Ahmed’s prince stalks not castle ramparts but underpasses, bus stops and CCTV-glazed plazas, where concrete, glass and LED glare become a new architecture of paranoia. In this adaptation, the city’s night buses hiss like ghostly messengers, tower blocks loom as vertical dungeons and estate stairwells stand in for shadowy corridors where plots are whispered and loyalties curdle. The familiar geography of London – kebab shops closing at 2am, corner shops with flickering strip lights, police sirens ricocheting off river walls – sharpens the sense that corruption and grief are not remote courtly concerns but part of the everyday street-level weather. The result is a tragedy that feels uncomfortably close,as though the audience could step out of the theatre and walk straight into the play’s next scene.
The production leans on the capital’s fractured streetscape to externalise Hamlet’s splintering mind, setting key confrontations amid high-rises and shopping arcades that echo with hollow consumer promises. When royal intrigue unfolds beneath billboard screens and in the echo of train tunnels, the language of power is reframed as a distinctly urban dialect-one of gentrification, surveillance and social exclusion. Moments of stillness arrive at bus shelters and canal paths, where the prince’s soliloquies feel like the private thoughts of any young Londoner caught between rising rents and shrinking futures. The staging’s ingenuity is quietly underlined by choices like these:
- Empty office lobbies doubling as sterile throne rooms
- Graffiti-tagged walls mirroring the play’s themes of rebellion
- CCTV cameras acting as silent courtiers and spies
- Underlit parks suggesting both refuge and threat
| Location | Dramatic Function |
| Rain-soaked alley | Haunted encounter |
| Tube platform | Inner turmoil |
| Glass office block | Cold political power |
| Canal towpath | Fragile intimacy |
Direction cinematography and sound design crafting a chilling modern psychological thriller
Under Elham Ehsas’s taut direction, the camera becomes an accomplice to Hamlet’s unraveling, stalking Riz Ahmed through nocturnal London in jittery tracking shots and oblique reflections. Neon smears across rain-streaked windows, CCTV perspectives fracture the frame, and tight close-ups linger just a fraction too long, forcing the audience into the prince’s claustrophobic headspace.The city’s architecture functions as a psychological map: underpasses echo with menace, glass towers dwarf the characters, and empty bus stops feel like purgatory. Fast, almost subliminal jump cuts mirror intrusive thoughts, while longer static takes during soliloquies allow Ahmed’s performance to simmer, daring the viewer to look away.
- Handheld framing that mimics the instability of Hamlet’s grief-stricken mind.
- Urban nightscapes used as emotional weather, from sodium-orange dread to sickly blue calm.
- Silences and sonic voids deployed as aggressively as any musical cue.
| Element | Effect on Audience |
|---|---|
| Low-frequency rumbles | Subconscious anxiety |
| Distant sirens | Urban unease |
| Muted dialog | Disorientation |
Sound design threads the production together with an almost forensic precision. Instead of a lush orchestral score, the film leans on brittle, percussive motifs: the metallic grind of Tube trains, the hum of faulty fluorescents, the muffled thud of bass bleeding from nightclub walls. Whispered voices bleed into traffic noise,creating the sense that Hamlet’s paranoia is seeping into the city itself.When music does break through, it is sparse and unnervingly dry-single piano notes left to decay into silence, or electronic pulses that resemble a faltering heartbeat. The result is an aural landscape in which every echo and hiss feels like a threat, amplifying the tragedy not through spectacle but through a sustained, nerve-fraying tension.
Who should see this adaptation recommendations for Shakespeare purists newcomers and film fans
For those who treasure the Bard’s original verse, this version may feel like walking a tightrope between reverence and reinvention. The soliloquies are not always delivered in the hushed, reverential tones of the playhouse; instead, they bleed into phone monologues, therapy speak and late-night rants on rain-slick pavements. Yet key lines are preserved, often landing with a jolt precisely because they erupt from such contemporary settings. Purists will find cause for debate in the streamlined court politics and retooled supporting roles, but they may also appreciate how the film treats Shakespeare not as a museum piece, but as a living argument staged against the surveillance cameras and gentrified estates of modern London.
Newcomers and casual filmgoers are offered a thriller first and a “classic” second. The pacing leans into noir, with Riz Ahmed’s haunted, hyper-modern prince pulling the story through Uber rides, underpasses and late-night corner shops.The psychological stakes are crystal clear even if you’ve never cracked open the play, and the visual language – dashcam angles, neon reflections, CCTV feeds – does much of the narrative heavy lifting.For viewers weighing up whether to step in, this guide may help:
- Shakespeare enthusiasts – expect bold cuts, sharp recontextualising, and fiercely committed performances.
- New to Hamlet – come for a gripping urban tragedy that doubles as an accessible crash course in the play’s core themes.
- Film-focused audiences – treat it as a character-driven London noir with poetic dialogue and a breakout central turn.
| Viewer Type | Best Reason to Watch |
|---|---|
| Text loyalists | Fresh angles on familiar speeches |
| Curious first-timers | Clear, modern emotional stakes |
| Cinema devotees | Stylish London-set psychological drama |
Key Takeaways
what lingers from this production is less the novelty of its setting than the clarity of its argument: that Hamlet’s anguish, suspicion and moral paralysis belong as much to our fractured present as to any imagined past. By threading Shakespeare’s verse through the city’s architecture and its shadows, the production insists that the prince’s crisis of conscience is not an antique curiosity but a living, troubling force.
Ahmed’s performance, taut and haunted, becomes the focal point of that force. Around him, London itself functions as a silent chorus, its alleys and underpasses mirroring a psyche on the brink. This is not a definitive Hamlet – no such thing exists – but it is a distinctly contemporary one,and a reminder of how powerfully the play can be reanimated when a director is willing to follow its ghosts into unfamiliar territory.
