Interview - Conrad Nelson: A long soliloquy shows director’s passion for play

it’s only because I have to carry out another interview that I eventually get Conrad Nelson off the phone. An hour in and he is just warming to his subject.

Lord only knows how he’s managed to keep his rehearsals down to three weeks. To be fair to the director, he’s been waiting a long time to be able to talk about this production.

Hamlet has been on the cards for Nelson for at least a couple of years. Resident director and composer of Halifax-based theatre company Northern Broadsides, Nelson has worked alongside Barrie Rutter for nearly two decades almost since the inception of the company in 1992. The two of them are an unlikely couple who have found an artistically fruitful collaboration.

Those who know Broadsides – and the company is incredibly well supported in its home county – will be aware that together they have made a formidable pairing, with productions that have won praise from critics and audiences alike for presenting raw and muscular work.

Rutter set up the company nearly 20 years ago to reclaim the language of Shakespeare for a Yorkshire tongue.

Iambic pentameter could make an easy bedfellow with the short vowels and disappearing consonants of a Yorkshire accent, was Rutter’s belief, and shortly after setting up the company he invited Nelson on board.

High points of the company’s history include the Wars of the Roses in 2006, in which Nelson was a brilliant Richard III. Shortly after playing the role, Nelson started to think about taking on the job of directing Hamlet. The production was planned for 2009 and then Othello happened.

The Broadsides production, which opened at the West Yorkshire Playhouse before transferring to London’s West End, starred Lenny Henry in his first stage role as Shakespeare’s Moor and Nelson as Iago. Henry was highly praised, Nelson was simply brilliant.

The London transfer and the plaudits that came with it were great for the company, but it pushed the schedule for Nelson’s Hamlet back until March this year. Little wonder he has a lot to say about the play.

“It’s not until you’re directing it and working on it with a group of actors that you really get deep into the heart of the play. You can read it and see it as many times as you like, but it’s when you are working on it intensively in this way that you get those real eureka moments,” says Nelson.

“It has been like carrying out an archeological dig on the text.” In recent years the play, arguably the greatest Western text, has been explored by a number of directors, with high-profile names playing the Prince of Denmark. David Tennnant, Rory Kinnear, Jude Law and on the stage of Sheffield’s Crucible, John Simm, have wrestled with the questions posed by the play. Nelson deliberately sought out a cast that was not high-profile, but would bring a youth, energy and freshness to a production.

“It’s the Juliet syndrome, by the time you’re old enough to understand the role, you’re much too old to play it. For me now as a 47-year-old, the things Hamlet says mean something entirely different to what they meant to me when I was a younger man. I wanted to find a young cast that would be able to play the ages as they were written.”

Finding the cast was only the beginning. The reason Nelson talks for so long on the subject of the play is because he appears to have forensically examined every part of it. There isn’t a passage in the play about which he doesn’t have an opinion that he wants to share.

“It has so much depth and so much to say about the human condition,” he says. “And it grapples with these incredibly complex emotional questions about the human condition and does it with an incredible simplicity. ‘To be or not to be’ is such a plain speaking speech – should we live or should we die? It’s that simple and yet it’s that complex at the same time.”

Nelson goes on to discuss the Gravediggers scene, quoting chunks from the script and also suggests one of the reasons the play works so well is because of a juxtaposition of scenes. Hamlet’s relationship with Ophelia exists in a context against the one he has with his mother, and the gravediggers’ scene sits with the famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy. It’s an interesting theory and one that, frankly, I struggle to keep up with.

What is clear is that when the play arrives in Scarborough next week for the Yorkshire leg of its tour it will have been probed and excavated and Nelson will give us a Hamlet that, like its director, has plenty to say.

Northern Broadsides hits

1992: Richard III: The company’s first production.

1996: The Cracked Pot: Blake Morrison’s new version of a German play.

2003: Henry V: Conrad Nelson plays the king.

2006: Wars of the Roses: Epic undertaking of nine hours of theatre.

2009: Othello: Lenny Henry won praise and awards for his performance.

Hamlet, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, Mar 22 to 26. Viaduct Theatre, Halifax, Mar 29 to Apr 2. West Yorkshire Playhouse, Apr 19 to 30.