12 – 14 February
Has Shakespeare’s longest, most challenging and arguably greatest play ever been more popular? Last year’s acclaimed RSC adaptation set aboard the doomed Titanic was followed by the spellbinding musical and dramatic fusion of Hamlet with Radiohead’s seminal album, Hail to the Thief. The tragedy poignantly threads its way through the acclaimed 2020 Maggie O’Farrell novel, Hamnet, becoming first a play in 2023 before hitting the big screens in January this year. Aneil Karia’s visceral cinematic reimagining was released last Friday. There is clearly a voracious appetite for the melancholy Dane, his tortured, existential angst in a rotten, corrupted world seemingly resonating with modern audiences more than ever.
To this thriving canon we can also add this gripping one-man show, first performed, appropriately enough, at The Bear Pit Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in April last year. Written by and starring Mark Carey, Dead on Cue is a deliciously traditional ghost story, a spooky thriller set in the same dressing room of the same theatre, where the same play – Hamlet, of course – is being performed, sixty years apart.
Carey has a rich pedigree of successful one-handed shows. Act One sees him monologuing as fading East End music-hall star Bertie Tindall, resentfully relegated to the minor role of the gravedigger in a 1958 stage production which features fictional rising star Claude Mason as the Prince of Denmark. Tindall’s intriguing tale lays a number of clues for the second act, set sixty-five years later, with Carey this time cast as Hamish Fife, promoted to understudy and the ghost of Old Hamlet, with the beknighted Mason, now an ageing theatrical legend, still occupying the lead role. Yet Tindall and Fife’s narratives have even more in common than we initially realise as secrets long since buried in the old dressing room under the stage come ominously to light. A versatile and talented performer with over forty years’ experience of stage and screen, Carey skilfully presents two very different but richly characterised monologues whilst also interchanging seamlessly between several additional minor characters when needed.
Carey’s writing is equally impressive. Much like the late Tom Stoppard’s existential tragicomedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, where these two doomed characters perform around, as well as in, Hamlet, Carey’s play’s great strength lies in the cleverness of the script: the writer delicately weaves strands of Shakespeare’s text into the narrative as the ‘onstage’ Hamlet takes place offstage, à la Noises Off, disembodied voices from an intercom system connecting to the dressing room in the bowels of the theatre and fuelling the play’s taut, supernatural mood. Fittingly for Shakespeare’s most ghostly play, Dead On Cue has the spinechilling feel of an MR James story brought to life on stage. Some simple, low-budget, yet highly effective technical trickery means the show has some creepy surprises up its sleeve. Kevin Oliver Jones’ original score and producer Giles Shenton’s sound design are suitably sinister, while the edge of your seat, where you may well find yourself at times, is conveniently just inches from the action, the fifty-seat Irving Studio the perfectly intimate venue for this tense and unsettling tale.
Dead on Cue is an understated gem that cleverly holds a distorted mirror, obliquely, up to Shakespeare’s original play, exploring many of the same themes, yet it also stands alone as a gripping ghostly tale with an unexpected final twist. Talking of mirrors, you may well also think twice before looking in one when you get home.
★★★★☆ Tony Clarke 13 February 2026
