Alex Lawther, known for his portrayal of troubled young men in projects like “The End of the __ing World” and “Black Mirror,” has taken on the Western canon’s moodiest: the title role in “Hamlet,” now running at the Park Avenue Armory.
Though the English actor, 27, said his second New York stage appearance (following 2019’s “The Jungle” at St. Ann’s Warehouse) is going smoothly, the production has not been without its troubles, including an injury during rehearsals that delayed the premiere and led to the last-minute recasting of Gertrude.
“Angus Wright, who plays Claudius and did so back in London, says he’s now played the part with four different Gertrudes,” Lawther said. “I suppose it’s a testament to the resilience and flexibility of actors that there’s no such thing as ownership of parts; you just find your feet in a company.”
In a recent interview, Lawther described the works of art that have helped him get into the play’s tragic key; in order to embody Shakespeare’s doomed prince, he said he was counseled by the director, Robert Icke, to “become an expert on grief.”
“The wonderful thing about literature is that there’s so much grief — it’s something of a whole genre,” he laughed. “So I readied some literary allies and friends, as it were; books and poets I could turn to that offered some sort of reflection on Hamlet, accidentally or not.”
These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
1. “Pandemonium” by Andrew McMillan One of my best friends gave it to me on my birthday, and I read it in one sitting. It deals with acute suffering, but with such a language that you might have with a friend on the phone. Toward the end of the book, there are a lot of allusions to working a garden, and the connection between that, the relationship the speaker has to someone they love, and the struggle between keeping the garden alive and keeping this loved person alive. It’s not an easy read, but it’s very moving.
2. The song “Grace” by Kae Tempest I started listening to the album this is from, “The Line Is a Curve,” as rehearsals kicked off, but not because I was searching for a soundtrack to the play in any way. This last song is like some ancient saint has looked something terrible in the face and come back from that only interested in talking about love. There’s this sense of experiencing pain and responding to it with masses of love. I listen to this song every night before I go onstage.
3. “The Argonauts” by Maggie Nelson I remember a director once saying to me that sometimes it’s useful to think of text as an obstacle, and that you’ll never really get to say what you want to say. In the book, Maggie and her partner Harry have a conversation quite similar to that, about how you can’t blame a net for having holes, or something like that. That was a facet of something I was trying to understand with the heavy, thorny text of Shakespeare.
4. “Paroles” by Jacques Prévert I live partly in France, and I speak quite good French now, but I didn’t when I first arrived. So I was trying to find French writers that I could read in French to try and get better. Prévert is amazing because, as a writer, he has immense profundity, but his language is really, really simple. For a non-speaker, you can sort of sit there quite happily, with a pencil, reading his poems, which are often quite short and with simple syntax. It’s words you might learn in high school, but the ordering of them is so beautiful.
5. “Keep the Lights On” (2012) dir. Ira Sachs I wanted to watch a film set in New York before coming here, and I’d seen this one years ago and been really moved by it. It sat in my brain for a while and came back to me. There’s something so vulnerable and tender and sort of feral about Thure Lindhardt’s performance in it.
6. Nigel Slater’s lemon and thyme cake I have some things that I cook again and again, and one of them is this cake. My mom introduced me to Nigel Slater, and now we both buy each other his cookbooks for Christmas. It’s basically a lemon drizzle cake but with a ton of almond powder, so it’s very moist, but it feels very grown up because you put thyme in it. It makes me feel like I’ve got control over my life and quite sophisticated, which are both sort of fantasies of mine.
7. “A Common Turn” by Anna B Savage This is her debut album, and it’s extraordinary to have the courage to be as frank as she is here. It’s this otherworldly voice that touches on something almost operatic, something huge and expansive and intimate. She’s going to cringe if she reads this, but I gave our Ophelia, Kirsty Writer, a copy of this album because there’s something I think Hamlet’s obsessed with about using honesty as a tool. I think he would love Savage’s music for that reason.
8. Duncan MacAskill’s postcard art MacAskill has a project he’s been doing for decades where he will send other artists pieces of his own work to wherever they are in residency. They might just be colors or cartography or collage, and he’ll often put a GPS coordinate on them, which points you to another place in London.
I love the idea of an artist being in conversation with another artist through their work. I think it’s good, when you’re working in a group, to remember that there’s other work being made elsewhere, and that we’re all part of something a little bit larger.
9. “Mayflies” by Andrew O’Hagan The friend who gave this to me described it as an ode to friendship, which I think is a better way of putting it than I possibly could. It’s about two young men who are best friends during their high school years. The first part is about this crazy, sort of filthy weekend they spend in Manchester and how that weekend encapsulates the whole of their youth. In the second half, 30 years later, one of them is terminally ill. It tricks you into thinking it is a coming-of-age story, but it’s more about coming to terms.
10. “The Sopranos” It does something I suppose we’re trying to do with this production, which is making something on a very big scale that is ultimately about the fractured nature of being part of a family, and how complicated it is to live with other people. They live in a castle, and the choices they make influence the well-being of an entire state, but they’re still struggling as mother and son, sister and brother.
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