Review: The Play’s The Thing: A One-Person Hamlet at Wilton’s Music Hall

Date: 9th April 2025

Stars: 4

Hamlet walks on stage. So does Claudius. Then Gertrude. Then Polonius. Except… it’s still just one person. And somehow, your brain doesn’t rebel. It adjusts, leans in, and starts to see what this stripped-back solo production is really doing: it’s not trying to be a traditional Hamlet – it’s trying to break it open.

Mark Lockyer is the lone player in this bold reworking of Shakespeare’s most quoted tragedy, adapted and directed by Fiona Laird. He tackles the text with remarkable clarity, even when the pace is relentless and the characters are practically queuing up to speak. In a play where identity is already slippery, the solo format becomes a strange asset; you start to wonder whether all these characters are fragments of one troubled mind. And that idea lingers.

This is Hamlet without the padding, but not without the weight. Laird’s edit is clean and intelligent – iconic moments remain, but the fat is gone. The storytelling is surprisingly fluid, even for those not fluent in Elizabethan drama, and Lockyer has the knack for cutting through the poetry to find the feeling underneath.

His Hamlet is particularly well-judged: not overwrought or theatrical, just deeply human. He delivers the big speeches not like a man trying to impress a theatre full of people, but like someone who’s genuinely thinking them for the first time. That makes all the difference.

There are moments where the ambition of the format slightly trips over itself, however. Scenes with multiple characters – especially ones requiring confrontation or high tension – sometimes lose sharpness. There’s only so much one body can physically do to distinguish a duel from a debate.

And while the decision to go without props or set dressing adds to the psychological atmosphere, a few well-placed shifts in lighting or sound might have supported the transitions more clearly, so occasionally, we’re left working just a bit too hard to follow the shifts, and the emotional rhythm falters.

This is not Hamlet with bells and whistles. It’s Hamlet boiled down to its essence: grief, madness, memory, and decay. And in a venue like Wilton’s – already soaked in ghosts – it makes a strange kind of sense. Lockyer holds the weight of it all with remarkable control, and the result is a performance that lingers in your mind long after the final line.

The Play’s the Thing: A One Person Hamlet is at Wilton’s Music Hall until 12 April 2025: https://wiltons.org.uk/whats-on/the-plays-the-thing-a-one-person-hamlet/