The Adaptation

This version of the play Hamlet was developed in 2021 for the Halifax Regional Arts’ All City Shakespeare production, which was rehearsed and recorded over ZOOM and presented as a virtual play. HAMLET features the talents of fourteen high school students from all over the Halifax Regional Municipality. To best suit the production, Shakespeare’s original play has been adapted in the following ways...

Internal Cuts

The full text of Shakespeare’s HAMLET is 31,000 words and takes roughly four hours for a professional company to perform from beginning to end. As such, it is rare to see an un-adapted version of HAMLET (or of most Shakespeare plays, for that matter.)

For this project I’ve concentrated mostly on “internal cuts”, meaning I have left the structure of the play un-altered, but instead have “trimmed” the scenes throughout to remove as much of the text as I could while remaining true to the structure of the language, motives of the characters and important elements of the story.

The end result is 13,555 words; Resulting in a fast-paced, plot driven version of HAMLET.

Character combining and removing

This adaptation keeps the majority of the major characters in Shakespeare’s HAMLET intact, with minor servant, messenger and attendant’s lines being reassigned to Marcellus and Bernardo to keep those characters involved in the play.

The most major removal from this adaptation is that of FORTINBRAS and the characters primarily associated with him. Fortinbras represents an outside view of the political landscape in Denmark, eventually assuming power at the end of the play. In removing this aspect of the play, this production focuses on the interpersonal dynamic of Denmark’s royal family, leaving out the broader political context.

Drew Douris-O'Hara

June 2021