British Theatre Guide Blog

Now here’s an oddity - a blog devoted entirely to Hamlet.  No, it’s not someone pretending to be Hamlet and writing as if blogging were something that happened in Elsinore at that time (but what a good idea that would be! Exam question: write Hamlet’s blog after the visit of the Players!) but it’s by a guy called Stuart Ian Burns and it’s a survey/review of every production of Hamlet he can find in every medium.  He’s been writing it since 2005 and there are at least 100 posts dealing with a range of Hamlet-related topics.

It’s all very personal, of course, but nonetheless interesting.  Burns compares watching productions of Hamlet to listening to your favourite album again and again - actually, it’s probably more like listening to all sorts of different versions of your favoutite song, but the idea’s a good one.

 It’s well worth a look.  You’ll find it at thehamletweblog.blogspot.com/

He’s now asking for assistance.  Here’s what he says:

As a single subject weblog written by one person (me) it’s sometimes  tricky to keep track of the many productions of the play happening throughout this country and the rest of the world.

What I’m suggesting is that if you’re a theatre or theatre group that you please keep the details of the weblog on file and should you be producing the play or something related (the opera, for example, or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead) right now or in the future that you send through details  so that I can tell everybody about it on the blog.  This could be in the form of a press release but if you want to write something more personal that would be great too.

It needn’t be a production either — if you’re a publisher and have a related

book in publication, or a gallery preparing an exhibition which features images

depicting the play, I’d love to hear about that too.