After Miss Julie is a Classics for a New Climate production. Our goal is to reduce the amount of energy taken from the National Grid by 50% in the production of this show. That’s 50% less than we would usually use to produce a show in The Maria studio. By going through this process we hope that we will learn how to make theatre more ecologically sustainable which , we hope, will have an affect on the way we produce across all our theatres in the future.
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Young Vic Theatre blog 
So, a new view of Hamlet by Ian Rickson. Alas, it seems it is yet another ego trip my a trendy director,nto tell us what he thinks Shakespeare’s play is all about. This is the current fashion. It is getting ever more tiresome. I wonder whether Rickson has noticed that this marvellous play is, in its whole context and concept, set in high Renaissance? Ideas and controversies of that time, its ideals, its doubts about faith, its politics, are all inherant in the text. It is also, has he not noticed, set in a Danish court of high princes and politics. Like all great works of art it has a universall and timeless archetypal meaning, which in fact are emphasised when set in such a background – as Jung pointed out, archetypes tend to use archaic language (fairytale and myth). And it so happens that Shakespeare depicts Hamlet as in fact sane, only posing as mad for his own purposes, to unravel the madness of the power politics around him. The archetype of the father seeks by that means to push Hamlet into the hero who overcomes all. Hamlet is the “glass of fashion”, a noble prince, not a madhous nutter in jeans and a dirty sweater. Ophelia is his anima image deranged by the politicking around her, and a still immature Hamlet who sees he as betrayer, not a druggie. So, here at the Young Vic we have a remarkable silly view all done in scruffy clothes, yet the odd medieval sword around, Polonius as a kind of psychiatric warder, supervisor. Oh dear again….
PLEASE!!! Can we one day have a Hamlet which allows Shakespeare and his verse to speak, and stop these trendy adolescent university or polytechnic stuff by teenage minds? And how about a designer who does set it in haunted castle passages which echo Hamlet’s mind, a mother fixation and complex which he seeks to resolve? Can we have some grandeur which also honours this superb play? or is it assumned that young people today ared so dim they need to be told it is all about today?