Chela De Ferrari had been searching for her Hamlet for years. The project lingered in the Peruvian director’s mind, postponed again and again, until a chance encounter changed everything.
During an internal meeting at La Plaza theatre, in Lima, she met Jaime Cruz, a man with Down syndrome, who had worked as an usher for three years. He introduced himself as an actor, and she invited him for a coffee. Their conversation became the spark for a radically new version of Hamlet, one that would intertwine Shakespeare’s text with the lived experiences of its performers.
Next week the production opens Dublin Theatre Festival. Eight actors with Down syndrome share the role of Hamlet, exploring both the play and their own stories. Rather than being about a solitary prince, it becomes a communal meditation on presence, visibility and the right to exist, a performance in which the historically marginalised take centre stage.
De Ferrari was uncertain to begin with. “Would the actors be able to take ownership of Hamlet? Would it be possible to merge my aesthetic pursuits with theirs? How do you work with personal material without invading or turning intimacy into spectacle?” she says, in a mixture of Spanish and English. The answers emerged slowly, “scene by scene, through constant exchange and mutual trust”.
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The casting process was unusual. “We weren’t looking for verbal fluency, physical precision or technical control,” says De Ferrari. “On the contrary, we embraced characteristics that would usually be seen as disqualifying: pronounced stuttering, difficulty articulating, long pauses, moments of blankness.”
She was searching for more than just ability. “The essential requirement was that they genuinely wanted to be part of the project and understood its nature. Otherwise it would have been dangerous and, above all, unethical.”
Once the eight actors were assembled, the rehearsal room became a space of exploration, improvisation and learning. The team spent a full year in rehearsal, a luxury that is rare in the theatre world but was necessary for a process that combined creation and training.
“Each actor chose a character from the original play and became a ‘specialist’ in that role,” says De Ferrari. They built biographies, researched their parts through memory and experience, and explored Shakespeare’s language through drawings, songs, improvisations, letters and confessions. In many scenes the line between character and actor blurred, producing moments of rare vulnerability and insight.
De Ferrari calls the creative process behind the play a dialogue between Shakespeare and her cast, mediated by her pen. She would take fragments of the actors’ stories, their improvisations and their reflections, and combine them into scenes that integrated the original text.
“We asked the actresses to write a dream,” she says of one sequence. “I took those texts home and wove a scene that interlaced fragments of their dreams with lines from Ophelia. Nothing was imposed. Everything was discussed.”
The ensemble’s chemistry grew naturally over the long rehearsal period. “A family was built,” says De Ferrari. The bond was evident not just on stage but off it: even now the cast remain in daily contact, exchanging messages and maintaining relationships that extend beyond the production. The sense of community and mutual support resonates in every gesture and line, she believes.
De Ferrari’s vision of Hamlet is influenced by her broader artistic practice and her understanding of theatre as a space for social reflection. Her admiration for Samuel Beckett informs the play’s aesthetic: a respect for emptiness, fragility and expanded time. Yet she also draws from Peruvian ritual theatre, where there’s no clear division between actor and spectator, sacred and profane. The stage, then, becomes a space of potential transformation.
The visual arts, in which De Ferrari trained before turning to theatre, inform the production’s attention to colour, light and spatial composition. Video projections and lighting operate as emotional counterpoints, amplifying the actors’ presence.
The production, she says, opens with a projection of a real birth, intended to confront the audience and establish a tone: visceral and powerful. Music, movement and LED projections punctuate the performance, yet the stage remains largely empty, allowing, she says, the actors’ bodies, voices and gazes to occupy the space fully.
For De Ferrari this version of Hamlet is a statement about visibility. In Peru, as in much of the world, people with cognitive disabilities have historically been marginalised in artistic spaces. “This play was a way of saying these voices not only belong on stage but can also rewrite the canon from their singularity.”
Touring internationally has revealed new facets of the play to the director and the cast. De Ferrari says that, after performances in Barcelona, Edinburgh, New York, Brighton and Chicago, she has seen prejudices fall away as audiences recognise the honesty, complexity and power of the ensemble.
Cultural context has also shaped perception: in cities more familiar with Shakespeare, audiences grasped subtle references, nods to the original text and gestures that might otherwise be lost. Each city, she says, has informed the performance, shaping its rhythm, small gestures and pacing. “Hamlet is a living piece, always in dialogue with each audience.”
Language and translation play a crucial role in an Irish context. In Dublin the actors will perform in Spanish, with English surtitles. Humour and nuance can shift across languages, De Ferrari acknowledges, but she hopes that, far from distancing the audience, the surtitles will create a more active form of engagement.
The director is mindful of the ethical responsibilities inherent in working with untraditional casts. Avoiding tokenism and fostering genuine creation depend on clear communication, mutual understanding and rigorous casting, she says.
“The actors were not just ‘included’. They were cocreators,” she says. “They shaped the work with their voices, their bodies and their emotional landscapes. What’s fascinating is how the actors have touched Hamlet, transformed it, given it new urgency and emotional core.”
We’ve seen how words like diversity, inclusion or equity have become targets of attack
Financing and logistics are significant challenges, especially given the extended rehearsal period and the need for tailored training. The support of Teatro La Plaza provided a framework that made the project possible. Public perception also had to be navigated carefully; early audiences were hesitant at first, uncertain whether the production was genuine theatre or a social project.
Over time, word of mouth helped their production be appreciated on its own artistic terms.
De Ferrari puts this Hamlet within the broader continuum of her work. Her previous projects, such as La Cautiva and her “trilogy of violence”, also grapple with exclusion, visibility and who is given a voice. Across all her work, the underlying questions are about who has the right to fully exist and how theatre can act as a space of symbolic repair, resistance and collective imagination.
De Ferrari’s next project, a free adaptation of Twelfth Night, will explore the bond between two siblings, one with Down syndrome, casting old lines in a new light. As with Hamlet, the aim is not faithful replication but transformation: creating space for new voices, new perspectives and new dialogues.
In a moment when diversity, inclusion and equity are increasingly under threat, Hamlet takes on a sharply political resonance. “We live in times when certain lives are still denied, rendered invisible or devalued,” says De Ferrari says.
“In different parts of the world, especially in the wake of political discourse from figures like Trump, we’ve seen how words like diversity, inclusion or equity have become targets of attack. Inclusive programmes are being defunded, access policies are being eliminated and many universities are formally removing these terms from their institutional principles.”
Against this backdrop, presenting Hamlet with a cast of actors with Down syndrome becomes an act of defiance. “It’s not just about challenging who can play a central character,” she says. “It profoundly reconfigures the meaning of the question ‘to be or not to be?’
“When that question is uttered by someone whose very existence has been historically questioned, it becomes urgent, poignant and undeniably real.”
Hamlet is at the O’Reilly Theatre, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, from Thursday, September 25th, until Saturday, September 27th
