Speaking from the theatre’s rehearsal room, the director of a major new revival explained how contemporary design and diverse casting are being used not as gimmicks, but as tools to sharpen the text’s inherent urgency. “The language is 400 years old, but the emotions are not,” she says. “Our job is to make the audience lean forward, not sit back and admire.”
The production, which begins previews later this month, places the action in a recognisable now: a world of rolling news, shifting alliances and personal loyalties tested by public pressure. Yet the verse remains untouched. No lines have been modernised, no scenes transposed to a different century for the sake of novelty. Instead, the director has focused on what she calls “the architecture of the language” – the rhythm, the pauses, the rhetorical turns that carry meaning as much as the words themselves.
Design meetings began with a single question: what does this play look like if we refuse to treat it as a museum piece? The answer, according to the director, was a set that feels both timeless and immediately familiar. “We have a bare stage with a few movable elements – a long table, a set of chairs, a backdrop that shifts from opaque to translucent. It is not a literal representation of any specific place. But the costumes are contemporary: sharp suits, casual wear, the kind of clothing you would see on any high street or in any office.”
Lighting plays a crucial role in shifting between public and private moments. The director explains that scenes of courtly intrigue are lit with a cold, clinical brightness, while intimate exchanges drop into warm, close pools of light. Sound design is similarly restrained: no swelling strings to tell us how to feel, but ambient noises – a distant siren, the hum of a fridge, the click of a phone camera – that anchor the action in a shared reality.
The director is candid about the casting process. “We were not looking for diversity as a box-ticking exercise. We were looking for the best actors who could inhabit these roles with truth. That meant opening auditions far beyond the usual pools.” The result is a company that reflects the UK today: actors of different ethnicities, ages, body types and regional accents. A key role, traditionally played by a white man in his fifties, is now taken by a Black woman in her forties. Another, a young lover, is played by an actor with a visible disability.
Does this change the play? “Of course it does,” the director says. “But Shakespeare’s texts are robust. They can hold multiple interpretations. What matters is that the relationships feel real, that the power dynamics make sense, and that the language is spoken with clarity and intent. When you cast diversely, you are not doing the play a favour. You are revealing something that was always there, waiting to be seen.”
For all the contemporary framing, the director is adamant that the verse must breathe as Shakespeare wrote it. “We spend hours on iambic pentameter. Not to be pedantic, but because the rhythm is a map of the character’s thought. When you break the metre, you need to know why. When you stress the wrong syllable, you can lose the meaning.” Rehearsals include exercises in scansion, but also in physical grounding: actors walk the lines, clap the beats, and speak them in their own accents before returning to a neutral stage voice.
The director offers a practical example: a soliloquy that is often delivered as a mournful reflection. “We found that if you pick up the pace slightly, and let the consonants bite, it becomes a man thinking aloud, not a man performing sadness. The audience leans in because they are watching a mind at work.” This approach extends to the ensemble: crowd scenes are choreographed with the precision of a newsroom, every actor aware of their own through-line even when silent.
One unexpected challenge has been the handling of asides and direct address. In a contemporary setting, when an actor speaks to the audience, it can feel like a stand-up routine. The director’s solution was to treat the audience as a confidant – someone the character trusts, or sometimes someone they are trying to convince. “We experimented with where the actor looks. Not at a fixed point, but at individual faces. It changes the energy completely. The audience becomes complicit.”
Another discovery concerned props. A modern setting means modern objects: a smartphone, a laptop, a takeaway coffee cup. The director insists that every object must earn its place. “If a character checks their phone, it has to be because they are waiting for news, or avoiding a conversation. It cannot be a lazy way to show that we are in the present day. The same goes for a gun or a letter – in Shakespeare’s time, these were everyday items. Today, we have to make them feel equally ordinary and equally dangerous.”
So what should audiences expect? A production that respects the play’s history while refusing to treat it as a relic. The director hopes that people will leave talking about the themes – power, betrayal, love, grief – and how they resonate in a world of 24-hour news and social media pile-ons. “We are not updating the text. We are trusting it. And we are trusting the audience to meet us halfway.”
For those who have seen the play many times, there will be fresh discoveries. For those who have never seen it, the clarity of storytelling and the immediacy of the design should make it feel like a new play. “That is the test,” the director says. “Not whether we have been clever, but whether the audience feels the knot in their stomach at the same moments Shakespeare intended. If we get that right, the revival has done its job.”
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