HAMLET DIRECTOR GREG DORAN ON TENNANT
The British Theatre Guide May 27, 2008
"Hamlet is a play that waits for the right actor to come along.
This Hamlet will be to some extent who David is. You have to have an actor who can be, as Ophelia describes him, ‘the poet, the soldier, the scholar’.
He has to be someone who is charismatic and can be brutal and course,
and can be witty and moving and can physically take on the demands of
the part. I believe that David’s skills fill all these criteria."
'If David Tennant couldn't hack it as Hamlet, there would be no point in casting him as Hamlet,' says a defiant Doran.
'I was sorry [Miller] said all that, because David made
his career at the RSC and he's a genuinely terrific classical actor who
also happens to have enjoyed success and celebrity in another medium.'
It is, in fact, another of Tennant's TV appearances that helped get Hamlet up and running. 'I'd worked with David some years before,' Doran says, 'and I saw him on [the BBC's] Who Do You Think You Are? and there he was in a church, holding a skull, in this graveyard, so I texted him and said: "I saw your Hamlet audition."
'We
got back in touch and I said: "Have you ever thought of coming back to
Stratford. He said he would really like to come back to Stratford, and
the play he wanted to do was Hamlet.