Hamlet at Bolton Octagon
Directed by David Thacker
Reviewed by John Waterhouse and Charles Britten, February 2018
It often seems the better known a Shakespeare play, the more modern directors and writers appear tempted to make it appear superficially different. Whether dressing people up as superheroes, placing the setting in a Nazi concentration camp or re-writing the whole story for a very different scenario linked only by tepid allegory, such attempts frequently go too far and produce disappointing results.