Justin Audibert’s production with the Hamilton star is part of season including Top Hat, Natalie Dormer’s Anna Karenina and new play Safe Space

Since opening in 1962 under its first artistic director, Laurence Olivier, Chichester Festival theatre has hosted some of the world’s greatest Shakespearean actors. But surprisingly it has never produced its own version of Hamlet. “It’s unbelievable, isn’t it?” says Justin Audibert, who in 2023 succeeded Daniel Evans as the theatre’s artistic director. “We’ve done three Antony and Cleopatras!”

Audibert is now preparing to direct Hamlet himself, with the tragic prince played by Giles Terera, who won an Olivier award when he starred as Aaron Burr in the London premiere of Hamilton. The play will open in September in Chichester’s smaller Minerva theatre. “We are imagining that Old Hamlet [the prince’s father] has let the kingdom decline,” says Audibert, whose production will explore the “leadership vacuum” that comes from an older generation “clinging on to power for a really long time”. Hamlet’s father “has definitely got some Biden vibes” says Audibert, and the director has also been reflecting on the succession of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad from his father, Hafez. Terera, who starred as Othello at the National Theatre in 2022, will play a Hamlet who is similar in age to his stepfather, Claudius.