‘Elsinore’ Review: Andrew Scott Is Heartbreakingly Great As AIDS-Stricken Star Determined To Play ‘Hamlet’ – Telluride Film Festival
Andrew Scott delivers a career-defining performance as Ian Charleson in "Elsinore," which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, dramatising the true story of the Scottish actor who insisted on playing Hamlet at Britain's National Theatre while dying of AIDS. Directed by Simon Stone from a Stephen Beresford screenplay, the film avoids conventional biopic territory to focus instead on Charleson's final act of artistic defiance, offering a rare and inspirational take on a story from the AIDS crisis that resists the genre's usual bleakness.
Charleson, known for roles in Best Picture winners "Chariots of Fire" and "Gandhi", stepped into Hamlet after Daniel Day-Lewis abruptly quit the production, and went on to complete 24 performances despite full-blown AIDS and chemotherapy, against medical advice; he died aged 40, seven weeks after the run ended. The film, praised for its editing by Valerio Banelli and production design recreating the National Theatre, also touches on the parallel debut at Telluride of "Into the Breach", a documentary on the National Theatre's history co-produced by Kenneth Branagh featuring Judi Dench, Anthony Hopkins and Gary Oldman.
- Andrew Scott stars as dying actor Ian Charleson in "Elsinore"
- Film centres on his defiant National Theatre performance in Hamlet
- Premiered at Telluride; Charleson died aged 40 in 1990
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Andrew Scott plays Ian Charleson, a Scottish stage and screen actor best known for films such as "Chariots of Fire" and "Gandhi", in a new film called "Elsinore". The story is set in the mid-1980s at Britain's National Theatre, where Charleson took over the lead role in a production of Shakespeare's "Hamlet" after Daniel Day-Lewis unexpectedly withdrew. Charleson went on to perform the demanding part while seriously ill with AIDS, at a time when the disease was little understood and carried heavy stigma.
The film has just had its first public screening at the Telluride Film Festival in the United States, an event where new films are often shown ahead of wider release to build early reviews and awards attention. It is directed by Simon Stone from a script by Stephen Beresford, and focuses on Charleson's determination to complete the run rather than following the usual pattern of a life-story biopic.
The wider context matters because AIDS-related stories from this period are more often told as tragedies, whereas this film has been noted for taking a different, more defiant angle. Its Telluride debut also coincided with that of a separate documentary about the National Theatre's history, "Into the Breach", reflecting broader renewed interest in the theatre's past at the festival this year.