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Upon hearing the word “Shakespeare”, many minds will wander to star-crossed lovers or three witches meeting in thunder, lightning or in rain. But there’s an endurance to the character of Hamlet, and indeed the play of the same name, that appears to resonate beyond many of Baird's distinguished stories. This year alone has delivered us Chloe Zhao’s Oscar-winning Hamnet, which conceptualises the play as a response to grief, and Riz Ahmed’s modern day interpretation which transitions the piece to the heart of a South Asian community, demonstrating that there is life still in the four-centuries old text.
In Simon Stone’s Elsinore, the final weeks of actor Ian Charleston in his battle with HIV/AIDS are centered around his undying urge to play Hamlet, in the now-famed production mounted at the National Theatre. As he grapples with his own morality, identity and dignity, Charleston reckons with the ghosts of his own past, and future, while playing the Prince of Denmark in this soul-stirring feature.
There’s absolutely no denying it: Elsinore IS Andrew Scott. A vehicle deservingly spotlighting a once-in-a-generation talent, there is a sense that despite a career of consistently strong film and television work that Scott’s career has led to this – and he absolutely relishes in the opportunity. Destined to bring audiences to rapture as Charleston, Scott plays the acting great with both the dry, charismatic wit used as a balm by many gay men, now but particularly in these dark moments of the community’s history as a coping mechanism, and with the crushing knowledge of a man with a heartbreaking sentence he cannot escape. There is something bittersweet in the determination of a man to forge his final days through the words of another, putting his own health at risk to leave his soul on the stage as Hamlet. Scott delves into the material fearlessly, honouring the legacy of a man who stands alongside countless men lost too early to the epidemic, and portraying the importance of crafting art in uncertain times.
It would not be unfair to say that the rest of Elsinore sits firmly in Scott’s shadow, constructed far more conventionally than it ought to be by borrowing from the biopic handbook. Penned by Stephen Beresford, the screenplay incorporates passages of the play effectively, providing texture to Charleston’s situation, as well as revealing the spirit of the theatre community around him. It’s a shame Beresford was unable to find a more creative manner to tell the rest of this story, which relies on familiar tropes and an overwrought score calculated to swell in the most opportune places to manipulate the story – it undermines the actual emotional depth of the story.
But none of that is to say it is completely unsalvageable. Scott brings such gravitas to the role and uplifts the ensemble around him, with the supporting cast around him uniformly strong: although Olivia Colman and Billie Piper are both sadly underused, their characters provide a strong emotional tonic to counter Charleston’s often blinkered commitment to the role.
A film that lives and dies by the man at the centre, Elsinore is constantly in the shadow of Andrew Scott’s truly magnificent central performance, his soul-stirring work by imbuing a depth and richness into otherwise rote and formulaic narrative. The story itself is tragic and haunting, with the filmmaking practises undertaken by Stone not particularly working on their own accord to enrich the material, but able to at least hold the space for Scott’s sublime work. Elsinore may not be a home run, but it is an undeniably powerful exploration of a man desperate to hold on to what he has while it’s slowly, devastatingly and painfully being taken from him.