Writer: Stephen Beresford
Director: Simon Stone
The 2026 BFI London Film Festival is full of theatrical stories this year but none will be greater than this, Stephen Beresford and Simon Stone’s Elsinore, the story of Ian Charleson playing Hamlet while his AIDS symptoms develop. Gathering a collection of theatre royalty, many of whom in tiny blink and you’ll miss them roles, this beautifully pitched film opens the festival with a piece that shows life can be stronger than death. Riven through with a love of Hamlet, Elsinore sets a high bar for the rest of the festival as Charleson sought quality not quantity of life.
When superstar actor Daniel Day-Lewis abruptly departs from the National Theatre’s production of Hamlet in 1989, director Richard Eyre goes looking for a replacement, approaching Charleson who must learn the role in only 3 weeks. Noticing a lesion almost as soon as it begins, Charleson’s health begins to fail and a number of setbacks occur. But he is determined to play the greatest part ever written, and as friends succumb to the disease, its contemplations of life and death drive him forward.
Playing the title role, Andrew Scott digs deep into this story, drawing heavily on his own experience at the Almeida Theatre and in the West End in 2017 and 2018. From this, Scott has a bone-deep understanding of this role and the various costs of playing it night after night, its emotional and physical impacts that flow through his deeply sympathetic and beautifully pitched performance as Charleson doing the same. Scott is utterly magnetic on screen, a performance filled with pain and understanding of the position Charleson was in as an actor whose private life and sexuality were not widely known as well as the community of men he encountered. But not only is Scott’s performance as Hamlet full of meaning but his shining interpretation of Charleson is full of hope, of vivid life, determination and engagement with all the layers he has to play in a man who refused to give in – “I’d rather die of Hamlet than of AIDS” he declares.
Beresford’s script is worthy of Charleson’s approach, less well known passages from the play fill every second as the lead reads, rehearses and performs, so many moments in those great words finding further resonance in Charleson’s life at the time. Simon Stone also directs with a care and sensitivity that will leave audiences tear-strewn, balancing the theatre world which he knows well as a stage director with the community of friends that Charleson was part of, three living strands, the HIV and AIDS sufferers, the life of the theatre and the scenario of Hamlet brilliantly and most importantly meaningfully meshed.
Supporting performances are strong from Olivia Coleman as Margaret Johnson his disapproving doctor, Scott’s own Hamlet alumni Juliet Stevenson and Luke Thompson as well as Monica Dolan, Adeel Akhtar and Johnny Flynne among others – Flynne having played Richard Burton playing Hamlet in Jack Thorne’s play The Motive and the Cue in 2023. It is occasionally sentimental but forgivably so when it’s so desperately moving. A fine tribute to a man who decided that the answer to the greatest question of all time was “To be.”
Elsinore is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2026 from 7-18 October.
