Michael Sheen will play Hamlet at the Young Vic in London next year.
He is celebrated for his uncannily accurate portrayals of real people, including Tony Blair, David Frost and Brian Clough. But Michael Sheen is also a fine Shakespearean actor, whose Romeo and Henry V were highly acclaimed early in his career. Today it emerged that he is going back to his roots – to play Hamlet at the Young Vic theatre in London next year.
It will be the third high-profile Hamlet to be staged in almost as many years in London, after David Tennant and Jude Law both garnered praise for their recent portrayals under directors Gregory Doran and Michael Grandage. Ian Rickson, who brought Jez Butterworth’s hit play Jerusalem to the stage but has never before directed Shakespeare, will direct Sheen in the role.
The pair are eager to look at the play entirely afresh Sheen said:
“It’s the most dangerous play that exists, yet our culture has made it safe. It has become a rite of passage play for actors. But it is about the very nature of life, death and reality. What I want is to make it difficult and jagged again, unsettling and uncomfortable and disorienting for the audience.”
He added:
“One of the advantages of coming at it at this end of my career” – Sheen is 41 – “is that I am less concerned with establishing myself as an actor. I’ve done enough things to realise that unless the whole piece is working, it doesn’t matter whether your part is big or small.”
Doing Hamlet with Rickson was his idea, he said. “I worked with Ian on [Harold Pinter's] Betrayal for a tribute to Pinter at the National Theatre. I liked the way he worked, we worked well together and I love the fact that he doesn’t really do classical stuff.
“I had seen Jerusalem at the Royal Court, and thought: ‘This is the guy for me.’ I asked him if he’d do Hamlet, and he said he’d go away and think about it, reread the play. I loved that he didn’t say yes right away. If he was going to do it, it was because he really wanted to do it.”
Rickson, for his part, described Sheen as “fantastically intelligent, but at the same time very alive emotionally. He has a certain maleness, combined with a poeticism, on stage. And he is suitably fearless in terms of going into the darkness in this play.
“A guiding thought for us is that it is about the madness of unprocessed grief. It is an extraordinary play that often we see sanitised. There is so much loss driving the play; it has a real depth-charge.
“I have never directed any old plays before except for The Seagull. The challenge is to make a text that can be so familiar feel urgent and resonant and fresh. I like the idea of treating classics as if they are new plays, and new plays as if they are classics.”
David Lan, the artistic director of the Young Vic, said: “Michael is a completely brilliant actor who for years has been playing what you could call character parts; he discovered he was a brilliant mimic. Not since Henry V [in 1997, for the Royal Shakespeare Company] has he played big classical parts.”
On the question of whether London had had enough of Hamlet over recent years, Lan said: “This is one of the rare times you can say it and it’s true: the play is inexhaustible. There are so many different strains of thought in that play. And Michael can act anything. He is an acting animal.”
Sheen will also appear with the newly formed National Theatre of Wales next February in his native Port Talbot in a version of the area’s traditional mystery plays created with poet Owen Sheers.
His recent roles have ranged from the White Rabbit in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland to the irascible Brian Clough in The Damned United to the vampire Aro in The Twilight Saga: New Moon, the second in the series of adaptations of Stephanie Meyer’s popular vampire stories.
He has played Tony Blair three times: in The Deal, the 2003 Channel 4 drama about the pact between Gordon Brown and Blair; in Stephen Frears’s 2006 film The Queen; and in this month’s The Special Relationship, about Blair’s friendship with Bill Clinton, by Peter Morgan.
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