Riz Ahmed, the brilliant actor of films like Venom, Four Lions, Night Crawler, Sound of Metal , and Relay among others, joined Nikita Kanda on BBC Asian Network Breakfast on February 5th to talk about his new film as producer and star, an adaption of Hamlet. In a wide-ranging, fascinating discussion, the actor spoke about how the film translates and transposes Shakespeare’s classic drama Hamlet to a modern South Asian tragic tale.
Let’s set the mise-en-scène
An electrifying reimagining of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, set in the world of a British South Asian family in contemporary London. Hamlet (Riz Ahmed) returns to London for the funeral of his father, but he is shocked when his uncle, Claudius, announces that he’s marrying Hamlet’s just-widowed mother. After seeing his father’s ghost, who says Claudius murdered him, Hamlet becomes consumed by rage and revenge. He goes to violent lengths to avenge his father’s murder, questioning not only his role in the family business but his own sanity.
In the interview, the actor revealed that Hamlet was the perfect play to adapt and set in a South Asian world and Desi community, “The DNA of this play (Hamlet) feels most alive, the most real if you put it in a community like ours.”
Expanding, he added, “I suddenly realised, actually, if you want to tell these stories, if you want to tell the most all-time famous classic play ever written, Hamlet, and make it feel real and make it feel modern, you actually just have to set it in communities like ours.”
He said growing up at a boarding school in the UK was Shakespearean experience in that it was far away from the reality of his life at home, “This is part of what really blew my mind as a teenager, you know, I felt very out of place [growing up]. I was at a private school where I felt out of place culturally, and even in the UK at that time, I was made to feel a bit like I didn’t belong, and Shakespeare felt like it summed up everything that I was on the outside of, right? It’s a posh establishment, kinda stuffy elite thing that wasn’t for me culturally.”
In reading the play, he saw his Hamlet set within his world. “And when I actually read the play, I was like, this is the brownest story I’ve ever read in my life! Like, it’s about who Hamlet can and can’t marry because the person he’s in love with is from the wrong family. It’s about your dead dad’s ghost coming back from the grave to tell you he’s disappointed in you, right? It couldn’t be more Asian than that. It’s about squabbling over the family business. There is literally a scene in the original about the wedding and it’s also that cultural traditional. A lot of the time in communities where some people marry their sister-in-law if their brother dies right so we’re protecting the orphans. I’ve actually grown up with people who’ve done that right, and so these are all things that are actually in the play of Hamlet, and for us, this isn’t history, this is part of our lived experience.”
Aneil Karia’s Hamlet, which blends classical language with modern design to create a tense, immersive experience for a new generation, is now playing in UK cinemas.
