CAST INCLUDED: Adura Onashile (Ophelia); Alison Peebles (Polonius); Scott Reid (Laertes, Hamlet).

This production was an adaptation of Hamlet by Alan McKendrick and it ran from 30 June - 5 July 2014. Production information taken from Theatre Record; may be incomplete.

"In Shakespeare's Hamlet, Ophelia is the dutiful child who is crushed by circumstance - a bit pastel-pale in a world full of roaring men who call all the shots. In this Classic Cuts, however, writer Alan McKendrick does not just strip away most of the play, he puts Ophelia at the centre of events and lets her speak her own mind - one that is restless, self-willed and incisively perceptive in her character assassinations of those around her. This Ophelia is a bored teenager, and when Adura Onashile in her little black frock and snazzy technicolour trainers describes Elsinore as 'dull, dull, DULL!' her voice and her body language create an instant thumbnail sketch of all the girls across time who were too intelligent, too feisty, too curious, to know their (insignificant) place in the scheme of things and just stay there....And in Onashile's utterly compelling interpretation of this mighty text, where McKendrick's sharp humour and flights of fine grandiloquent prose are intercut with Shakespeare's speeches, we encounter a free spirit who could well have saved Hamlet from his demons, because she was so well acquainted with them herself."  ~ Mary Brennan, Herald (Scotland), 1 July 2014, in Theatre Record 2014, Issue 13

"What's not in doubt, though, is Adura Onashile's mind-blowingly powerful and moving performance as a true Ophelia for our times; one who - like so many young women of the 21st century - have grown up thinking that she is free, only to learn that that freedom is largely illusory, and must be fought for all over again, or surrendered, in an unbearable moment of defeat."  ~ Joyce McMillan, Scotsman, 5 July 2014, in Theatre Record 2014, Issue 13