The character of real-life actor Ian Charleson, who took on the role of Hamlet for the National Theatre back in 1989 just weeks before he died, feels like one of those once-in-a-lifetime parts. Scott relishes the challenge, scaling a mountain that draws on every ounce of his soul.
Set in the midst of the AIDS epidemic in the late 1980s, it begins not with Charleson, but with Daniel Day-Lewis, the famed actor who famously froze on stage during a performance of Hamlet, before exiting stage left, never to return. It was, as the headline in the newspaper that Charleson reads, a “mystery”.
We never even see Day-Lewis’s face, bar a poster advertising the play, but he’s a ghost-like presence for a while in Elsinore, haunting Charleson, who admits he’s jealous of his fellow actor getting to play the part of Shakespeare’s Prince of Denmark.
View oEmbed on the source websiteWith Day-Lewis gone from the production, director Richard Eyre (a comforting Johnny Flynn) decides to recast – and he wants Charleson to play Hamlet, the part all actors dream of playing.
Looking after him is Dr Margaret Johnson (Olivia Colman), a pioneer in the field who helped set up the first open-access HIV clinic. Her concern is his health, not his desire to tread the boards, and theirs is one of the film’s most fractious (but fun to watch) relationships.
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While Scott (who played Hamlet on stage himself back in 2017) drives the film, Elsinore comes with a wealth of supporting talent. Peter Mullan as Charleson’s tear-strewn father; Monica Dolan as the pithy guardian of the NT’s stage door; Heartstopper’s Joe Locke as a fellow AIDS patient; Billie Piper as casting director – and bestie – Patsy Pollock; Matthew Beard as Charleson’s carer, director Sean Mathias; Juliet Stevenson as Hamlet cast member Sylvia Sims; and David Dawson (My Policeman), quite brilliant as filmmaker – and fellow AIDS victim – Derek Jarman.
Charleson refuses, afraid that his illness will overshadow his work. “I won’t be a victim,” he says. As the film builds to a stunning crescendo, thanks to crafty editing by Valerio Bonelli and a swelling score by Stefan Gregory, Charleson shows us, as Hamlet once said, what a piece of work is a man.
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