"The first words of Shakespeare's Hamlet, arresting in their ordinariness, are 'Who's there?' They are also, in another radical change, the last words of Book's version. No entrance of Fortinbras at the head of his army, the brisk, untroubled commander come to clear up the mess left by the prince of dreams, to restore daylight and normality. Instead, an echo of the opening, with the advent of the Ghost. But where that happened in midnight darkness, here the question is asked by Horatio, Hamlet's closest and only trustworthy friend, in a sudden brilliant crescendo of light. And in the midst of a resurrection: as the light mounts, all the corpses of the duel scene, and all the story's dead - Ophelia, Guildenstern, Rosencrantz, Polonius - risen from the floor, casting off their parts and assuming their condition as actors. 'But look,' says Horatio, like Edgar who endures all the disasters of King Lear, like every new-born baby at the end of Shakespearean carnage; 'But look,' he says, as they all stand and take us in, within the shared light; 'But look the morn in russet mantle clad / Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill.' And then, in the phrase that encapsulates all of Hamlet's openness to experience and hunger for knowledge that Brook has embodied: 'Who's there?' "-Michael Kustow. theatre@risk[this is the title of the book not an email address but enjoy the false, perhaps intended, link] - Seven Snapshots of Hamlet

Hamlet 1

::comment:: . . . as a first year acting student in my very first serious production . . . directed by a brilliant teacher Raymond Clarke . . . was honoured to be cast as the one who opened the play with 'Who's there' . . . at the first rehearsal was humiliated when, alone on stage, was directed to repeat the line over & over again . . . never attaining the "right" reading for the director . . . jeez i thought to myself, it's just one line . . . leave me alone . . . Who's there . . . Who's there . . . Who's there . . . Who's there . . . Who's there . . . Who's there . . . Who's there . . . Who's there . . . Who's there . . . Who's there . . . Who's there . . . Who's there . . . Who's there . . . Who's there . . . . . . forgot the question . . . Who's there?

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