My Hamlet

Linda Marlow has worked for the RSC, Steven Berkoff and across the West End: her latest show finally sees her play The Dane. Yet this is no slavish Shakespeare interpretation. Joining her are the puppets of Fingers Theatre from Tbilisi, and she ignored the idea that every actor wants to play Hamlet by giving the role to a cleaner in a theatre.

From this premise, My Hamlet builds an original vision of the great play, which is comic, tragic and features a cast of Georgian puppets, voiced by Marlow.

How did the collaboration with the puppets come about? Was it a case of the project demanding a particular approach, or did you know the company first?

Besik Kupreishvili, the Director of Fingers Theatre, devised the show for a festival in Lithuania, where the actor was a clown. The idea came from his belief that every actor thinks they could have given the definitive performance of Hamlet if only they’d been given the chance - so he gives them the chance. He asked Roger McCann, a British arts manager with years of experience in Georgia, if it might be possible to stage the show in Britain. He wanted an actor who had never played Hamlet and was never likely to do so. It was Roger who suggested me for the part and Edinburgh for the performance. He arranged for me to go to Tbilisi for the Tbilisi International Festival of Theatre in order to meet the company and explore ideas.

There is a split between the role of "the cleaner" and the grandeur of Hamlet... does this clash inform the interpretation?

This production is completely different to the version done in Lithuania. The show is called My Hamlet because each actor doing the play will take a different approach. The actor needs a reason to be doing the play and the idea of a theatre cleaner taking centre stage was the starting point for our production. We gave her a back story and decided that she would be a refugee, an accomplished actor in her own country but forced to flee. Unable to gain work as an actor in her host country she takes a job as a cleaner in order to maintain links with the stage. The play opens with her reflecting on her life, which bears remarkable similarities to Hamlet’s…

Linda's credits include some fairly "dark" work- include a Berkoff or two! I wonder whether this Hamlet has something of the night about it?

Because of the link between the cleaner and the similarity of her life to Hamlet’s, I am playing Hamlet very much from a woman’s perspective. Hamlet is a lost soul but the production is romantic, humorous, passionate and, of course, very physical and visual with the puppets playing alongside me.

Is there anything about the nationality of the puppets- that is to say, does Georgia have an especially lively puppetry scene? In recent years, we've had plenty of Eastern European shows blowing us away, but I can't remember any from Georgia... I wonder whether I am about to be introduced to something I wish I had known about years ago...

There is a strong tradition of puppetry in Georgia and very rich theatrical history. Rezo Gabriadze’s puppet show The Battle of Stalingrad was a sell-out at Edinburgh three years ago and a puppet version of Faust, directed by Levan Tsuladze, played the Gate in London in 2002 and undertook a small tour in 2003. Fingers Theatre came to Edinburgh as part of a British tour in 2001. Other notable productions from Georgia include the Rustaveli Theatre’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle and Richard III directed by Robert Sturua in the late seventies; The Georgian Film Actors’ Studio in 1988 with Don Juan and 1992 with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, both directed by Michail Tumanishvili; and in 2001 the Marjanishvili Theatre was in Edinburgh with Antigone directed by Temur Chkheidze.