"To be, or not to be" is the question that has haunted generations, but Goodnight Sweet Prince, now playing at Sydney's The Old Fitz Theatre, asks a more contemporary one: how do you keep living when the world you have inherited feels irreparably out of joint?
Liesel Badorrek’s intimate 70-minute reimagining of Shakespeare’s Hamlet transforms the prince’s famous existential crisis into a meditation on generational grief, the mourning of not only what has been lost, but what was promised and never arrived. It begins with a deceptively simple theatrical question: who will be Hamlet tonight?
With Raj Labade and Jack Twelvetree swapping the roles for each performance, Badorrek makes the casting itself part of the drama. Hamlet becomes less a fixed character than a vessel for uncertainty, contradiction and the overwhelming weight of inheriting a broken world.
What is the premise of Goodnight Sweet Prince?
Rather than offering another adaptation of Hamlet, Goodnight Sweet Prince is less interested in Hamlet the play than Hamlet the man. Drawing from excerpts of monologues and scenes across Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy, Badorrek creates a portrait of a man consumed by grief, paralysed by indecision, and haunted by questions that cannot be resolved through logic alone. With Hamlet at the centre, the tragedy feels less like something he participates in and more like something that happens to him – an overwhelming force he is unable to escape. Through this lens, Badorrek uses Hamlet’s contradictions to examine contemporary pressures on men: the expectation to perform strength while privately carrying profound emotional pain.
What are the highlights of Goodnight Sweet Prince?
This is perhaps why Goodnight Sweet Prince feels so relevant for the next generation of theatre fans. Freed from the expectation that Hamlet must be preserved exactly as written, the production allows the play’s emotional core to emerge: isolation, uncertainty and the exhaustion of living in a world that no longer matches its promises.
Hamlet’s grief extends beyond the death of his father; it reflects the experience of inheriting a world shaped by expectations that increasingly feel impossible to fulfil. For many navigating economic uncertainty, social instability, and the erosion of promised futures, Hamlet’s existential “madness” feels strikingly familiar. Goodnight Sweet Prince understands that grief is not only mourning what has been lost, but mourning what we were told would exist and never did.
Badorrek’s direction is refreshingly assured, allowing Verity Hampson’s lighting and Ross Johnston’s sound design to become Hamlet’s co-conspirators. Together, they envelop the performers with purposeful precision, using light, shadow and sound to externalise Hamlet's inner turmoil, evoke the presence of his father's ghost, and conjure the lingering burden of Ophelia's love. Against Keerthi Subramanyam’s disintegrating set – a castle in ruin reflecting both the decay of Elsinore and Hamlet’s fractured interior world – the design creates a landscape of psychological collapse. Every technical choice feels purposeful, heightening rather than distracting from the emotional core of the production.
How do the cast bring Goodnight Sweet Prince to life?
On the night I attended, Labade inhabited Hamlet with dazzling intensity. There is something vitally important about seeing a South Asian actor embody a character so deeply concerned with vulnerability and emotional exposure. Hamlet is a figure desperate to be seen, to have his grief, anguish, and contradictions acknowledged, and Labade brings profound resonance to that longing. Within Shakespeare’s complicated colonial legacy, Labade’s performance feels like an act of reclamation, expanding who is allowed to inhabit one of the canon’s most celebrated figures.
Labade’s Hamlet resists the traditional image of the prince as purely intellectual or detached. Instead, he presents a man whose thoughts and emotions threaten to overwhelm him – a Jekyll-and-Hyde-like figure constantly shifting between quiet composure and a frenzied unraveling. That volatility gives the performance a rawness that makes Hamlet’s internal conflict immediate and painfully human.
Twelvetree offers a striking counterpoint, taking on multiple characters but finding particular power as King Claudius. His portrayal is charismatic, seductive, and deliciously menacing – a figure of confidence and machismo who provides moments of dark levity against Labade’s exposed and vulnerable prince. The contrast between the two actors reveals the production’s greatest strength: Hamlet is not one singular identity, but a character shaped by the world he inherits.
Yet this ambition also creates the production’s only weakness. The emotional foundation between Hamlet and Horatio remains too thin; their bond never fully develops into the profound friendship that Shakespeare’s ending relies upon. As a result, Badorrek’s alteration of Horatio’s role in Hamlet's death introduces a compelling moral question without giving the relationship enough dramatic weight to sustain it. The difference between Hamlet being poisoned by circumstance and being handed the poison by a trusted friend is enormous, and the production leaves that rupture largely unexplored.
Perhaps this unresolved tension is intentional, reflecting the very quality that has allowed Hamlet to endure: it does not provide answers, but forces us to confront life’s most philosophical questions. Goodnight Sweet Prince does the same, even when some of its questions remain unanswered.
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