Cush Jumbo: It’s taken three years to bring Hamlet to the stage — I’m a different person now

"Hamlet" - Press Night - After Party
To be or not to be: Cush Jumbo with co-star Tara Fitzgerald
Dave Benett
Robert Dex @RobDexES5 October 2021

Cush Jumbo has said she felt a “huge responsibility” bringing Hamlet to the stage.

The production was set to open last year but was postponed due to the pandemic — and Jumbo said it was “definitely not the show it would have been” had it gone on when originally planned.

The Good Fight star said: “My son is three-and-a-half... when I started thinking about putting on this play he was six months old and I was still breastfeeding. Now he has whole conversations with me about Paw Patrol and goes to the toilet by himself.

“I’m a different person. That combined with everything that’s happened in the pandemic, being separated from the people that you love and to be honest being separated from my church, the theatre, for it to be closed and for us not to be able to be here.

“So we all felt this huge responsibility to come back.”

"Hamlet" - Press Night - After Party
Hugging Fiona Shaw
Dave Benett

The Young Vic production has been billed as “Hamlet for a new generation”. The actress said part of the appeal of the part was that Shakespeare’s tragic prince was “a boy who is born in the wrong time”.

The actress, who previously played Mark Anthony in an all-female Julius Caesar at the Donmar Warehouse, said the play written after the death of Shakespeare’s son was “about grief for the son he was never going to see come of age”.

The south Londoner, who won an Evening Standard emerging talent award in 2013, said she thought the audience would be able to identify with Hamlet’s mental turmoil. She said: “I struggled with depression in my twenties so I can identify with that and I think most people can identify with that at some point in their lives and yet within that there is light and there is dark comedy.”

She added: “If the play you’re doing has no relevance for the people coming to see it then you’re doing ... Shakespeare for the sake of saying pretty words and doing pretty things. I thought this was more than ever the time for this story to be told.

“Now there are many, many types of young people feeling displaced and feeling they don’t fit where they are either because of the pandemic or because of their gender or politics or race or the environment and so I knew it was identifiable.”

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