Daily Inspiration Quote by Trevor Nunn

Ambition, here, is framed less as ego than as a kind of private hoard: “saved up for myself” suggests a director banking desire the way you bank clout. Trevor Nunn isn’t describing a casual career goal; he’s confessing to a long-game fantasy with a very specific altar. “Fully fledged professional production” reads like an insistence on legitimacy, an anxious repudiation of the half-measures that haunt theater careers: workshops, fringe runs, promising near-misses. He’s not chasing Hamlet anywhere. He’s chasing Hamlet at Stratford.

That location matters. The Royal Shakespeare Theatre isn’t just a venue; it’s a credentialing machine, a symbolic capital factory where Shakespeare becomes both art and institutional rite. To “bring off” Hamlet there implies a test you either pass or don’t, a high-wire act in the most surveilled arena possible. The phrasing carries a craftsman’s superstition too: you “bring off” a production the way you pull off a heist, suggesting risk, exposure, and the potential for public failure.

Subtextually, Nunn is acknowledging the way British theater turns Shakespeare into a career crucible. Hamlet is the Everest role for actors, but for directors it’s also a referendum on taste, authority, and interpretive nerve. Saying he “wanted most” to do it tips us into the emotional economy behind the institution: the hunger to be recognized by the place that defines the canon, and the fear that without that recognition, you’re still practicing at the margins.