"Hamlet is a remarkably easy role. Physically it's hard because it tends to be about three hours long and you're talking the whole time. But it's a simple role and it adapts itself very well, because the thing about Hamlet is, we all are Hamlet"
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Calling Hamlet "easy" is the kind of provocation only an actor can get away with, and Schreiber knows it. He’s not dismissing Shakespeare; he’s puncturing the prestige aura that clings to the role like velvet dust. “Easy” here means legible. Hamlet’s engine is straightforward: a smart, feeling person trapped between what he knows and what he can bear to do. The difficulty isn’t conceptual, Schreiber argues, it’s physiological and logistical: three hours of language, stamina, breath, focus. In other words, the hard part is surviving the marathon, not solving the mystery.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the industry’s obsession with “cracking” Hamlet as if it were a cipher. Schreiber reframes the part as an adapt-and-respond role: Hamlet “adapts itself very well” because the play is basically a pressure cooker for modern interior life. Doubt, self-surveillance, performative sanity, moral nausea, sudden rage - these are not antique problems. They’re the daily weather of anyone with enough consciousness to second-guess their own motives.
“We all are Hamlet” lands because it’s both democratizing and slightly damning. It flatters the audience by inviting identification, then implicates them in the paralysis. The cultural moment matters: contemporary Hamlet performances often lean into therapy-speak and self-awareness, staging the prince less as a singular tragedy and more as a recognizable type - the overeducated, overstimulated person stuck in analysis mode. Schreiber’s intent is to strip away the museum glass and remind you: this isn’t a relic. It’s a mirror that keeps adjusting to whoever stands in front of it.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the industry’s obsession with “cracking” Hamlet as if it were a cipher. Schreiber reframes the part as an adapt-and-respond role: Hamlet “adapts itself very well” because the play is basically a pressure cooker for modern interior life. Doubt, self-surveillance, performative sanity, moral nausea, sudden rage - these are not antique problems. They’re the daily weather of anyone with enough consciousness to second-guess their own motives.
“We all are Hamlet” lands because it’s both democratizing and slightly damning. It flatters the audience by inviting identification, then implicates them in the paralysis. The cultural moment matters: contemporary Hamlet performances often lean into therapy-speak and self-awareness, staging the prince less as a singular tragedy and more as a recognizable type - the overeducated, overstimulated person stuck in analysis mode. Schreiber’s intent is to strip away the museum glass and remind you: this isn’t a relic. It’s a mirror that keeps adjusting to whoever stands in front of it.
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| Topic | Art |
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