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Shakespeare Uncovered

David Tennant

Nicola Stockley

Richard Denton

Shakespeare Uncovered: Episode 6: David Tennant on Hamlet

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Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Episode 6

Episode 6: David Tennant on Hamlet

David Tennant on Hamlet

BBC Four - Shakespeare Uncovered, David Tennant on Hamlet

David Tennant meets other actors who have played Hamlet, from David Warner to Jude Law.

David Tennant, whose own RSC performance as Hamlet was a huge hit, meets other actors who have played the role and tries to unravel the meaning of the play.

In Hamlet, David Tennant, whose own RSC performance was a huge hit, meets other actors who have played the role - from the legendary David Warner in the 1960s to the recent Jude Law. He also tries, alongside Simon Russell Beale and Ben Whishaw, to unravel the meaning of the play and the reason why it is considered by many to be the greatest play Shakespeare ever wrote.   

David Tennant surprised when he took on the role of Hamlet - most did not know that he had trained in and worked for many years at the Royal Shakespeare Company. But that didn't mean he wasn't scared stiff at the prospect of taking on the legendary role. Now he takes up the challenge of unravelling the story and trying to uncover what it is about it that has made Hamlet the most famous of all of Shakespeare's plays. 

He revisits his own performance, alongside his director Greg Doran, and he meets up with other actors who have tackled the role. With the historian Justin Champion he tries to enter the mindset of the 16th century audiences who would have watched this story and he discovers how different generations of actors, directors and scholars have interpreted the play.   

What he discovers is that Hamlet is a play full of questions rather than answers - but they are the questions we all continue to ask ourselves to this day. Questions about who to believe, who to trust, how to live and how to love, how to understand life and how to face death. What all the actors who have played it seem to share is that the process of acting the role is deeply and profoundly personal - and perhaps that is why audiences also feel that the play touches them more than any other play before or since.

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Shakespearean actors and directors reveal the stories behind some of his greatest plays

Six Shakespearean actors and directors go in search of the greatest dramatist who ever lived by revealing the stories behind and the wonders within some of his greatest plays

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Episode 6: David Tennant on Hamlet

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