By Jenna Panther, 3rd Year Student, National Theatre Conservatory

Jenna Panther

When people ask me what part I am playing in the National Theatre Conservatory’s production of Hamlet, I am always pleased watch their reaction as I tell them that I am playing one of the Hamlets. They look at me like I am crazy, until I tell them that for the purposes of this production, the role of Hamlet is being split up among four actors: two men and two women.  Each actor plays a section of the role and then the next actor comes in and takes over—sort of tag team style.  The original reason for casting four actors as Hamlet was merely to even out the work.  But in our time working on the piece, we have come to discover how splitting up the role might help tell the story in a new way.  By having four actors, two of whom are women, play this one role, we are able to highlight certain aspects of the character, like Hamlet’s masculine and feminine traits.  Over the course of the play Hamlet has quite an evolution.  Each of the four actors marks a huge stage in his development.  We start with Sean playing the pouty juvenile delinquent, who is suddenly charged with purpose when he meets his father’s ghost.  Next Rebecca enters, searching for answers and full of intellectual curiosity.  Then Scott takes over, as the angry young man who takes action, but fails in his attempts.  Then, I come in, a new man, resolved to my fate and coming to terms with my own death.

This approach obviously has many challenges.  One of them being that each of us is only playing a piece of a role.  So we must all agree on the choices that are made.  Any choice that one actor makes reverberates in the others’ performances.  For instance, Hamlet says that he will put on an “antic disposition” and so all four actors must agree on what that looks like and sounds like when Hamlet is “acting crazy.”  Since I am playing the fourth Hamlet and don’t enter until the end of the play, I must understand and agree with the choices that have been made by the other actors.  What’s more, I must play my section of the part as if I had actually played the others.  I must fully engage my imagination and enter with the full weight of what has happened before my entrance.  Of course, this is important in all acting, but it just seems more extreme in this case.  Another challenge is figuring out how, if at all, being a woman might have an impact on playing Hamlet.  In the beginning we talked about whether or not we should lower our voices and move more like men. We have discovered that Hamlet does have many masculine and feminine qualities, so we can in fact use our femininity in the playing of the role as opposed to trying to conceal it.  As difficult and exciting as it is to play even a quarter of Hamlet, it makes me wonder how daunting and incredible it would be to get to play the entire role someday.

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