The last Hamlet

With The Last Hamlet, British choreographer and director Ben Duke—known for his sharp style blending dance, theatre, and humour, as well as for his disorienting rewritings of classical works—starts from a simple yet radical idea: staging Hamlet for the very last time. A text that has traversed centuries, and a protagonist who embodies the man of thought and non-action, becomes here the perfect metaphor for procrastination itself. Do we still need him today?
From this question, Duke constructs an ironic and paradoxical performance in which a Hamlet aware of his own “cancellation” attempts one final strategy to remain relevant: reinventing himself as a stand-up comedian. Gone are the famous soliloquies, replaced by a contemporary form of comedy built on observations about love, revenge, existence, and, of course, dead fathers.
Alongside him, a small group of performers embodies all other characters, moving between stage and offstage, reality and imagination, within a continuous play of roles and shifting perspectives. With his company Lost Dog, Ben Duke dismantles Hamlet as a universal figure and turns him into a living device to speak about masculinity, responsibility, and power in a present where “something is rotten” no longer concerns Denmark alone, but seems, as the work suggests, to be everywhere.