As Hamlet, Nadeem Phillip Umar-Khitab crafts a character he can finally connect to
At Bard on the Beach, the actor makes the most of Stephen Drover’s taut adaptation, after six years of work on the project
Nadeem Phillip Umar-Khitab in Bard on the Beach’s Hamlet. Photo by Emily Cooper
Bard on the Beach presents Hamlet to September 20 at the BMO Mainstage Tent in Vanier Park
THE TITLE ROLE in Hamlet comes with legendary weight, expectation, and prestige. Considered the supreme test for an actor, it carries a punishing number of soul-baring soliloquies, and has 358 speeches in all—the most of any Shakespearean character. On top of that, the tormented prince is constantly doubting and deeply questioning in his multidimensionality. (“To be or not to be,” anyone?)
Actor Nadeem Phillip Umar-Khitab, who’s appeared in award-winning productions from Bard on the Beach’s hit Beatles musical adaptation of As You Like It to the Arts Club’s Onegin musical, has long been aware that it’s a role he’s expected to aspire to.
“For those of us who are trained at the theatre, especially guys, you’re kind of taught from a very early stage that playing Hamlet is the greatest career aspiration you could ever hope for,” he tells Stir after a preview matinee at the Bard fest’s Vanier Park site.
And yet, the role of Hamlet had never really spoken to him—a fact that came into focus when Bard on the Beach veteran Meg Roe suggested, several years back, that he consider it.
“When I started to think about what the reality of that would be, I kind of was averse to it, because I’ve never liked him. I never really connected with him —or rather, I should say, the portrayals of Hamlet that I had seen.” Mel Gibson, Ethan Hawke, Kenneth Branagh, Andrew Scott, Benedict Cumberbatch: he’d caught them all and had one reaction. “Usually it was ‘To be or not to be,’ and I never cared. I felt like ‘Go for it, dude. Doesn't matter to me,’” he admits. “And so the artistic inquiry was, ‘Well, would it be possible to make a Hamlet that, when he says ‘To be or not to be?’ it makes you want to jump out of your seat and say ‘No! Don't do it!’”
That idea of dragging Hamlet into a relatable here and now became a challenge—and then a passion project Umar-Khitab took up with director Stephen Drover, someone he admired for his ability to get at the essence of a play, “and throw away all the rest, anything else that’s just going to distract, or gild the lily”. That’s a sign you can expect a taut, considerably chopped Hamlet when their contemporary answer to the challenge finally debuts after six years, in the first production of the play at Bard on the Beach since 2013. There will also be parallels to a well-known contemporary story of a struggling prince.
This Hamlet is set in modern times, in a stylized library. “How do you bring this to people’s doorsteps? How do you make them care?” asks Umar-Khitab, then answers: “The best shot we have at that is to not have frilly collars.”
A key contemporary inspiration for Drover’s adaptation was none other than Prince Harry’s bombshell memoir Spare. Umar-Khitab cites the Windsor family as one of the few modern examples of what it means to be a royal today. And in Harry, he and Drover have found a prince navigating personal tragedy in ways that echo Hamlet’s struggles. Umar-Khitab, who’s listened to the audio version of the book, links the way Prince Harry experienced the loss of his mother, Princess Diana, to the way Hamlet suffers the loss of his father. The animosity that Hamlet feels toward his mother and her remarriage is also clearly reminiscent of the issues Harry expresses in Spare about King Charles and Camilla.
A moment that stands out specifically in that book for Umar-Khitab is the opening chapter, as Harry awaits his father and brother at Frogmore’s Royal Burial Ground, where many of the prince’s forebears are buried.
“I think despite all of the things that have happened in the life of Prince Harry, he somehow remains empathetic to absolutely everyone around him,” the actor reflects, pointing to the graveyard scene. “He’s standing around the graves of, you know, the former dukes and duchesses and Wallis Simpson, and he’s contemplating all of the things that they did in their lives, and the choices that they made, and what they would be thinking now if they could see what is happening between King Charles and Prince William and Prince Harry. He is contemplating what the dead would be thinking if they could they look at this situation.”
The moment reminds Umar-Khitab instantly of Hamlet’s famous “Alas, poor Yorick!” speech—the monologue ruminating on what becomes of even the best of people after death, delivered with the skull. (“I knew him, Horatio. A fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times.”)
“To wonder and to be curious about what is happening in someone else’s experience, and to try and feel that—that's the basis of empathy. But to do that with people who are dead, I feel, is a form of transcendent, supernatural, superhuman empathy,” Umar-Khitab observes. “And that was something of Prince Harry’s that I thought, ‘Oh, that’s a really beautiful quality that I can try to give to my guy.’”
The Harry-Hamlet connection is not such a stretch. Clearly either the prince or Spare’s ghostwriter, J.R. Moehringer, saw those parallels, too, writing about Harry, his father, and his brother being “more up to our ankles in bodies than Prince Hamlet” during their graveyard walk.
These are just some of the ideas driving the action onstage, where Umar-Khitab has been making even more discoveries with a cast of stellar costars—including Kate Besworth as Ophelia, Munish Sharma as Claudius, Jennifer Clement as Queen Gertrude, and Andrew Wheeler as Polonius.
“I saw this documentary about Paul Newman a few years ago. And when he was choosing films to work on, like Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, he was insistent that the best actors of the time be in the other roles,” Umar-Khitab says. “He knew his talent could only go so far, and that he needed talent all around him for the production to reach the heights he had thrown for it, and he knew that he would never be able to do that on its own. And I felt quite the same during the casting of this production. I knew that the role of all the other characters that Hamlet interacts with needed to just be the absolute best we could possibly have access to within Vancouver, within Canada. And I'm very happy to say that we have that show.”
Amid that cast, one of the most profound and personal casting choices for Umar-Khitab is veteran Vancouver actor-playwright Marcus Youssef as his father’s ghost. Umar-Khitab reveals that one of his favourite scenes in the play is with Youssef. Although this production is not “about” the fact that Umar-Khitab is a South Asian actor, he’s all too aware that it’s a role he might not have thought he’d be able to play at some points in his career.
“I always prop myself up in the morning with, ‘I can do anything anybody else can do.’ But it's very clear to me that we live in a world where that's not always the case,” he says. “And Marcus came to me in the early days of rehearsal and said, ‘This is just tremendous that you’re playing Hamlet. When I was your age, there would have been no chance I would have ever been considered, and nobody in an artistic leadership position would have considered it.’
“He was really letting me know that I am alive in an era, in a time, where something is possible that was not possible before—it wasn't on the menu.”
And so, after a long wait, Umar-Khitab is going to make the most of a role he can finally, deeply, relate to. 
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