CAPITAL Centre Research and Development: The Hamlet Project

Tom Cornford is a freelance theatre director and Artist in-Residence (2008/9) at The CAPITAL Centre. He is doing a long project on Hamlet, investigating the play through rehearsal and performance and by partially re-creating the lost or never-made Hamlets of Stanislavsky and Edward Gordon Craig, Meyerhold, Michael Chekhov and Andrey Tarkovsky. The project will culminate in a performance/discussion and an exhibition at The CAPITAL Centre.

Tom’s Biography

After a degree in English at Cambridge and training as an actor at LAMDA, Tom switched to directing. He was a trainee/assistant director at The Gate Theatre (where he directed Mamet’s The Shawl), Shakespeare’s Globe (where he has directed a number of staged readings of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays including the Quarto text of Othello with Danny Sapani and Hattie Morahan) and at The National Theatre Studio (where he trained in directing with Katie Mitchell).

His productions elsewhere include A Midsummer Nights’ Dream at Rose Bruford College, Richard III at The Cambridge Arts Theatre, his own aerial dance adaptation of Faustus at The Place’s Robin Howard Dance Theatre, The Last Priest at The King’s Head, The Faerie Queen at The Lilian Baylis Theatre, Sadlers Wells and Now Is the Hour at The Hill Street Theatre, Edinburgh. Time Out described his work as ‘shot through with moments of exquisite beauty, dazzlingly imaginative stagecraft […] seething with fresh ideas, talent and interpretative brilliance’ [Dec 2007].

The Team

Tom’s Hamlet team was co-ordinated by third year undergraduates Amelia Marsh and Rowan Rutter and comprised dramaturgs, designers and actors who met every Monday evening at CAPITAL to work on the play. They were: Josh Green, Luda Anestiadi, Tom Allott, Diane Baker, Meg Price, Katerina Watson, Josh Roche, Russell Bailey, Lucy Hall, Zoe Roberts, Sita Thomas, Jay Saighal, Fergus Nimmo, Paula Gil Baizan, Carl Cerny.

In the Spring term 2009, they re-created scenes from Stanislavsky/Gordon Craig’s 1912 production and Michael Chekhov’s 1924 Moscow Art Theatre Studio production (Weeks 1-4) and Meyerhold and Tarkovsky’s planned versions, neither of which was produced (Weeks 5-8).

On Tuesday 21^st April the Capital Centre presented Lost Interpretations of Hamlet, a look at four very different readings of Shakespeare’s masterpiece. The culmination of this year-long project exploring the text through the productions of Stanislavski and Gordon Craig (1912), Michael Chekhov (1924), and the planned, but never created, versions of Meyerhold and Tarkovsky.

This was a unique, one-off presentation, including a performance of an abridged-version of the play, infused with the techniques of these practitioners learnt, and a discussion of the work led Professor Tony Howard.  

Part 1 of 6- Stanislavsky Video

Part 2 of 6- Chekhov Video

Part 3 of 6- Meyerhold Video

Part 4 of 6- Tarkovsky Video

Part 5 of 6- Lost Interpretations of Hamlet Performance

This Video is an hour long and therefore may take a short time to load.

Part 6 of 6- Post Performance Discussion

This Video is an hour long and therefore may take a short time to load.