A Shakespeare Birthday Triple Bill: Minor Characters Take Centre Stage

Shakespeare's Birthday on 23 April has become my annual excuse to dip into Shakespeare, but this year I went slightly off piste. Instead of the “big” plays in their usual form, I opted for a triple bill of films that do something far more interesting: they hand the story to the people usually stuck at the edges.

Three films, three very different tones, but all circling the same idea, what happens when Shakespeare’s minor or marginalised characters finally get their say?

I started started with Rosaline (2022, Karen Maine). When Rosaline (Kaitlyn Dever = winning as per) is dumped by Romeo (Kyle Allen) when he meets Juliet (Isabela Merced), she sets about trying to get him back, but in so doing creates her own comic adventure. It’s an enjoyable anachronistic romp that gently pokes at the absurdities of Romeo and Juliet while still delivering as a sharp, modern romcom. Crucially, it sets up the theme of the day, the “wrong” character taking control of the narrative.

From there, a sharp tonal pivot into Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990, Tom Stoppard). Two minor courtiers (Gary Oldman and Tim Roth) are swept into the events of Hamlet, increasingly confused by a plot they don’t control and barely understand. Wordplay, coin tosses and existential dread ensue. It’s clever, talky and quietly unsettling, Shakespeare via absurdist comedy. If Rosaline shows you can bend the story, this one suggests the opposite, that the story is fixed and you are just waiting for your cue.

Rounding things off, Ophelia (2018, Claire McCarthy) offers a more introspective rebalancing. Reimagining Hamlet from Ophelia’s perspective, it turns her (Daisy Ridley) from passive tragedy into an active figure navigating court intrigue and survival before and during the familiar events (George MacKay). Visually, it leans hard into a Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic, echoing John Everett Millais’s famous painting. An interesting take, if occasionally more concerned with elegance than emotional bite, but still a satisfying attempt to give interiority to a character so often defined by her absence.

Watched together, the three form a surprisingly neat arc. Rosaline argues that the story can be hijacked. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead counters that it cannot be escaped. Ophelia, somewhere in between, suggests that even within a fixed narrative, there is still space to reclaim perspective.

Not a bad way to spend Shakespeare’s birthday!