Hamlet

Little Attic Productions is an indie production company based in London and Liverpool & founded by Lorna McCoid, who make film, music videos and theatre.

Co-Creator Statement from Kate: As a late-discovered Neurodivergent artist growing up at a time where accurate representations of neuro- and gender-non-conforming individuals were scarce (and remain so), I (Kate) frequently found solace and saw myself represented with positivity and nuance in Shakespeare. Despite having no training, academia, family connection, or background in Shakespeare, I was drawn at a young age to his works, with a natural affinity for the heightened form and language perhaps stemming from the heightened sensitivity with which Neurodivergent people experience the world, and a feeling of kinship for characters like Beatrice and Mercutio who transgress expectations of their assigned gender and associated social norms in similar ways to me. Watching Hamlet years later as an adult, I was struck by the ways in which this “Everyman” figure who (like Autistic stereotypes) is conventionally cast and assumed to be cis, male - and described as a “universally human” archetype - chimes with contemporary traits labelled as Autistic, AuDHD or twice exceptional Neurodivergent - from the literal way he responds to the question of what he’s reading with “words, words, words” to his fast-paced wit and difficulties with family and hierarchies, in addition to “failing” his assigned gender through “unmanly”, non-normative self-expression, relationships & grief. I initially set out to create a project representing Hamlet explicitly as Neuroqueer as a solo artist, but found a community equally excited by the concept, and ended up devising a short as proof-of-concept for a feature film. This short ended up proving this concept so well that it stands alone as a short neuroqueer reimagining of Shakespeare, currently being considered for multiple UK and international festivals.