Lawther said, “The book thing is mysterious to me still.” Tall and broad-shouldered, with owlish spectacles, he sat cross-legged on the floor in a black denim jacket and black sweatpants. “Had a bad night of sleep,” Icke, who is thirty-five, added.
Has a book.” (After the soliloquy, Polonius comes across Hamlet and asks what he is reading.) Slight, in jeans, sneakers, and a dark shirt, Lawther, who is twenty-seven, has a soft voice and a gentle manner. Lawther, trying to summarize his character’s emotional state, spoke telegraphically: “Seen Ophelia. Lawther and Icke were going over the Prince’s most famous monologue, about suicide, which falls in the middle of the play. In the play, the Prince’s dead father reappears as a ghost, but Lawther and Icke were contending with ghosts of their own: the accumulated legacies of performers, directors, critics, and other interpreters who have played Hamlet, or seen “Hamlet.” In other words: How not to be Hamlet? In a few weeks, Lawther would be performing as Hamlet at the Armory, in New York City. Helen’s Bishopsgate, a parish so close by that he could nearly have covered the distance in the time that it takes most actors to deliver his most quoted soliloquy. How could they make anew a work that was already being celebrated more than four hundred years ago, when its author walked along the streets directly outside the institute? Shakespeare lived for a time in St. They were in a spacious, light-filled hall at the Bishopsgate Institute, a Victorian-era structure near the Spitalfields Market. How to be Hamlet? That was the question facing Robert Icke, the theatre director, and Alex Lawther, the actor, when they met recently in London to rehearse the play from which, it has been quipped, everyone knows at least six words.
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