Hamlet with a Down syndrome cast at the Brighton Festival

The reality is that her production of Hamlet – featuring an extraordinary cast of young people with Down syndrome – has now played in 40 cities, and by the end of the year it will have reached 50.

Brighton is the latest, playing for one hour and 35 minutes (no interval) at the Theatre Royal Brighton (Friday, May 9, 7.30pm; Sat 10 & Sun, 11 2pm & 7.30pm, performed in Spanish with English surtitles).

The point is a new exploration of “To be or not to be”. The question is what does “To be” mean for someone who is nerodiverse; what does “To be” mean from the perspective of someone who has traditionally been excluded from society.

“I have always been interested in Shakespeare plays and Hamlet always appeared as a possibility but every time I faced the decision of choosing a new project I would to discard the idea because I just could not find the actor that was right for the project,” explains Chela, from Peruvian theatre company Teatro La Plaza.

But then she did. And in fact she found a number of actors who are right for the project. This is a very different take on the character of Hamlet.

“I have got eight actors with Down syndrome playing Hamlet. It's a very iconic play, maybe the best-known play ever, and traditionally the role of Hamlet falls on the shoulders of one iconic actor who is classically trained with a commanding voice and presence, someone who is celebrated and is revered of one is one of the best actors. It's about having perfect technical control and solemnity and intellectual complexity. But I wanted to question that tradition. Instead of a single voice I wanted many voices. Hamlet is shared across the group. The actors take on the role at different moments, each bringing their own rhythm and their own way of being. The crown is passed from one to the other, and the characters remind us that greatness can so often emerge from difficulty.

“The great actors traditionally play Hamlet with great elegance but in this production silences and stuttering are part of it. They are embraced. They are not rejected. We are seeking other ways of being on stage, and the audience finds beauty that they might not have considered, a beauty that can flow from flaws.

“We have got five actors and three actresses, and we rejected all the usual considerations when we were casting. We were looking for neurodiverse actors. It was so important to embrace the characteristics of neurodiversity. And it was interesting to see how our actors started with a lot of insecurity about the way that they were delivering the lines, but since we started rehearsing they realised that they were what we wanted and what we needed and it has been beautiful to see. One of the actors told me that they had never been trusted before in this way that we trusted them. We rehearsed for a year and you could see the development of the actors during that year. You could see how they gained confidence and responded and how they gained ideas and how they questioned our ideas. It was wonderful to see.”

Tickets through the Brighton Festival.