Hamlet, National School of Drama
/Director's Note: “I began my work on Hamlet with seven second year students of NSD in the last week of November. We had taken the play-within-the play in Hamlet for a series of improvisations. We tried to understand the play through this most brilliantly constructed scene by Shakespeare. It opened up many possibilities of making a performance of Hamlet with this scene at the centre. In spite of the problem of time and logistic constraints, the students gave their best. Often the actors doubled up as set, property and costume makers as well, as we did not have the students of design and direction with us. What you witness is a series of improvisations in which the students contributed much more than I did as the director of the play. The emphasis[...]was on the process per se and not the end product.”
The production is a polished, intense exploration in a small studio space of Hamlet's twin dilemmas of the duty of vengeance and the mother's remarriage.