Hamlet: Double Bill won The European Shakespeare Festival Network’s ShakeSphere prize in 2024. Since then, it has been performed all over Europe, including: York International Shakespeare Festival (UNITED KINGDOM); Shakespeare Festival at Globe Neuss (GERMANY); Craiova International Shakespeare Festival (ROMANIA); Ukrainian Shakespeare Festival in Ivano-Frankivsk (UKRAINE); Itaca Shakespeare Festival (SERBIA); The Gdańsk Shakespeare Festival (POLAND); Barcelona Shakespeare Festival (SPAIN); and Verona Shakespeare Fringe Festival (ITALY). We are proud to bring our award-winning production back to Teatro Sant’Andrea, after a sell-out season for schools in the Spring of 2025.

Hamlet: Double Bill is a game of two halves. In the first part, we meet the players after the dubious success of their performance of “The Mousetrap” at the court of King Claudius. They are on the road again with their latest production: “The Play’s The Thing!”. ‘Holding, as t’were, the mirror up to nature’, they also know that time is of the essence, and no audience has the time or patience to sit through three and a half hours of 400- year-old English verse. The second part, “The Rest is Silence”, is set in the churchyard where they laid Ophelia to rest. The gravediggers are digging again, for they must now inter the rest of the dead, before the night is done. Whilst they dig, they catch, as if on the wind, fragments of the words and thoughts of those who once were ‘too, too solid flesh’.

Together, Theatre 63 and La Ribalta Teatro have created, Waiting For Juliet, Hamlet: Double Bill, and their most recent collaboration, Tempest Toss’d, which was invited to open the 2026 Verona Shakespeare Fringe Festival. The English Theatre Company was renamed Theatre 63 in 2025 to remember our beloved David Thomas, a founding member of our company and an extraordinary actor.