


A modern tyrant in a surveillance state full of spies, informers and two-way mirrors in Doran’s thriller-like production, he presents a façade of smiling, bespectacled geniality.” Stewart also played the Ghost of Hamlet’s father. The cast included Mariah Gale as Ophelia, Peter de Jersey as Horatio, Oliver Ford Davies as Polonius, Penny Downie as Gertrude, and Patrick Stewart of Star Trek fame in what Charles Spencer of The Telegraph called “the strongest, scariest performance as Claudius I have seen. He is a fine Hamlet whose virtues, and occasional vices, are inseparable from the production itself.” “And Tennant, as anyone familiar with his earlier work with the RSC would expect, has no difficulty in making the transition from the BBC’s Time Lord to a man who could be bounded in a nutshell and count himself a king of infinite space. “Gregory Doran’s production is one of the most richly textured, best-acted versions of the play we have seen in years,” wrote Michael Billington in The Guardian. In 2008 the Royal Shakespeare Company drew rave reviews for its production of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which featured the Scottish actor David Tennant, star of the hit BBC science fiction show Doctor Who, as the tragically indecisive Prince of Denmark.
