Mark Lockyer

The Play's the Thing

A one-person Hamlet

An empty stage. Shakespeare’s most emblematic play. And an actor – one of the most acclaimed Shakespearean actors of his generation – who breathes new life into Hamlet with a performance where he takes on all the play’s key roles.

Bipolar actor Mark Lockyer’s The Play’s the Thing is an acting tour de force, breathing new life into the melancholy Dane and the numerous personalities that inhabit Elsinore castle – from a reticent Ophelia to a wily Polonius.

Fiona Laird, adapting the text into a lean 100 minutes, directs with a keen sense of gothic menace, inviting the audience to join an intimate storytelling experience. This is Hamlet, reenvisaged anew, as a contemplation of madness, discontent and the unstable nature of what constitutes the real and the imagined.

So prepare yourselves for a rollercoaster journey – capturing both the Danish prince’s febrile state of mind and the timeless quality of a play that probes the very meaning of life. Moving, funny and audacious, this is a refashioning of Hamlet that premiered in London in the spring of 2025, where role play and fragility walk hand in hand to haunting effect.

Mark Lockyer in The Play's the Thing. Photo: Tristram Kenton

Language

Performed in English

Contributors

• Fiona Laird director

• Anthony Lamble designer

• Tim Mitchell lighting design

• Mark Lockyer cast