Next month (14 –18 Apr) the Royal Shakespeare Company will bring their critically acclaimed production of Hamlet to York Theatre Royal’s Main House.

Hamlet, Shakespeare’s epic family drama of deceit and murder will be directed by multi award-winner Rupert Goold. Rupert’s theatre credits include celebrated productions of Dear England (National Theatre), and Romeo and Juliet and The Merchant of Venice (RSC). In 2026 Rupert will take up the role of Artistic Director of The Old Vic after 13 years at the Almeida Theatre. He has received Olivier, Critics’ Circle and Evening Standard awards for Best Director twice and won a Peabody Award in 2011 for Macbeth. In 2017 he received a CBE in the New Year’s Honours for services to drama.

Accomplished classical actor, Ralph Davis will play the title role of Hamlet. He was nominated for the 2023 Ian Charleson Award for playing Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, appeared as Edmund in King Lear (both at Shakespeare’s Globe), and most recently played Iago in Othello at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, for which he came second in the 2025 Ian Charleson Awards.

Rupert Goold, Director, said: “Hamlet is a play about the inevitability of death – the death of fathers, the death of kings, the mortality facing each and everyone of us, but it is also a play about how to live, what makes a good life and a just one too, however brief our allotted time. Our production is set aboard a ship but one that is soon to founder, going down with all hands. Its inspiration comes from the most famous sinking in history, and just as that icy tragedy came to pass in a little over two and a half hours our play takes place in real time and for about as long, as much catastrophic thriller as poetic meditation. It’s a production that asks what it means to be human and decisive when time is running out.”

Tickets are on sale now via yorktheatreroyal.co.uk and at Box Office (01904 623568)