Simon Stone (2026)

Simon Stone’s Elsinore, which opened this year’s London Film Festival, tells the story of Ian Charleson’s final performance, as Hamlet, at the National Theatre in late 1989 – a few weeks before his death from AIDS, at the age of forty.  For those who, like me, greatly enjoyed watching him on stage and screen, just seeing or hearing the name Ian Charleson prompts feelings of sadness and regret, which guarantees Elsinore a persistent emotional heft, though this also makes you more aware that Simon Stone is pushing too hard to reduce the audience to tears, especially in the closing stages.  I rather resented being told what to feel, having felt it from the start without the director’s help, but I liked the film a lot.  Andrew Scott is outstanding in the lead.  In the supporting cast, Olivia Colman and others do fine work.  Stephen Beresford’s curate’s egg of a screenplay is very good in parts.  Stone, who made The Daughter (2015) and The Dig (2021), develops a late-1980s context that’s often persuasive.  All in all, Elsinore does justice to an actor so worth commemorating.

By the late 1970s, Charleson, who was born and grew up in Edinburgh, was building a solid career in British theatre and television.  (I first saw him on stage as Peregrine in the National Theatre’s Volpone, in August 1977.)  His cinema breakthrough came in Chariots of Fire (1981), where he played ‘Flying Scotsman’ Eric Liddell, though this didn’t lead to other major film roles.  Charleson was diagnosed HIV-positive in 1986; early scenes in Elsinore describe his regular bathroom routine of checking his body for signs of something worse – what fellow AIDS sufferer Derek Jarman, who gave Charleson his first cinema role in Jubilee (1978), will facetiously describe as ‘polka dots’.  The first person to spot one of them on Charleson isn’t the actor himself but a woman making him up before he goes on a film set.  She doesn’t realise the significance of the mark on one of his temples (‘It’s only tiny’), but Charleson, once he looks closely in the mirror, instantly recognises the small purplish mark for what it is.  He doesn’t speak:  the panic in Andrew Scott’s eyes is piercing.

Most of Stone and Beresford’s scene-setting is effective.  Charleson in a gay bar in Soho, joking with friends.  Gay men dressed as nuns dispensing condoms on the street or in popular cruising places, to other gay men.  These sui generis community workers are members of the ‘Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence’ (each goes by a religious name – Sister Belladonna, Sister Frigidity of the Nocturnal Emission, and so on).  Once Charleson is seriously ill, Elsinore illustrates the physical ravages of AIDS more starkly than mainstream cinema’s usual combination of haggard pallor plus Kaposi’s sarcoma patches, although Andrew Scott’s face is never swollen, as Ian Charleson’s was, through septicaemia, by the time he delivered his twenty-four performances as Hamlet at the National.   His doctor, Margaret Johnson (Olivia Colman), who runs an AIDS clinic at the Royal Free Hospital, urges him in vain not to take on the role, convinced that doing so is bound to worsen his already fragile state of health.  Shortly before he’s due to give his first performance, when he collapses and is rushed to hospital with pneumonia, there seems no way that Charleson can rejoin the production but he does.  Elsinore is one of the most gripping show-must-go-on stories – not least because you know this truly is a true story – that you’re likely to see on a cinema screen.

The film’s strengths and weaknesses are sometimes very closely connected.  Charleson has three meetings with Derek Jarman (David Dawson).  The first is on a Soho street, where Jarman accuses Charleson of selling out, after ‘one queer role’ (in Jubilee), by cultivating the image of a ‘nice straight boy’ for the sake of a mainstream cinema career.  The last meeting is in Jarman’s famous garden in Dungeness, where the pair reconcile.  The intervening scene, when Charleson bumps into Jarman on the South Bank, is the most striking, for negative and positive reasons.  Jarman picks up where he left off in Soho, telling Charleson it’s his duty to go public about his AIDS diagnosis, to help other gay men, described by Jarman as ‘victims of the system’.  David Dawson, one of the cast’s weaker links, expresses Jarman’s intensity of feeling merely by shouting, so that any passer-by could hear (and if that was Jarman’s intention, Dawson needed to make it clearer).  Yet the response to this bad moment is both well written and powerfully delivered by Andrew Scott.  Charleson, who wasn’t from a socially privileged background, detects in Jarman’s dogmatic instructions the entitlement of the privately educated, which Charleson angrily (but much less noisily) deplores.  Clearly thinking back to Jarman’s derisive remarks on their previous meeting, he then insists he must continue to be credible in whatever role he’s playing – and won’t be fobbed off with pretty-good-considering-he’s-got-AIDS praise for his acting.  That speech is such a good moment in Elsinore that it made this viewer want to cheer.

Ian Charleson did, of course, request that the cause of his death be publicly announced, to draw attention to AIDS but, for as long as he was able to work, saw himself as actor rather than activist.  What he says to Derek Jerman outside the National, in effect, puts Simon Stone’s film in historical context since plenty of actors nowadays – among those who win awards and give acceptance speeches, at any rate – evidently see themselves primarily as representing a cause (or causes).  Another difference between actor ‘identities’ then and now, however, almost certainly helps Elsinore.  While I don’t subscribe to the theory that gay characters should only be played by gay people (disabled characters by similarly disabled people, etc), Andrew Scott’s casting as this particular gay actor yields various benefits.  Although Scott is now a decade older than Charleson was when he died, he’s physically and vocally comfortable in the role.  Natural empathy may have helped ensure that he’s never striving to ennoble his character:  Charleson comes across as more admirable, and his plight is more moving, than might have been the case had the actor playing him strained for heroism.  And Scott has played Hamlet on the London stage, in Robert Icke’s 2017 production at the Almeida then the Harold Pinter Theatre.  (Although I go to the theatre less often now than in Ian Charleson’s heyday, I did see Scott’s Hamlet in the West End.)  Scott knows from personal experience the colossal workload entailed in learning the lines, let alone developing a characterisation – things that Charleson had to do in double-quick time.

The film’s storytelling isn’t always clear, though.  The opportunity to play Hamlet in Richard Eyre’s production at the National arose because the original leading man, Daniel Day-Lewis, walked off during a performance and left the cast.  Elsinore doesn’t explain the notorious exit.  This may have seemed to Simon Stone the sensible option because Day-Lewis, over the years, has rather changed his mind about what happened.  At the time, he was supposedly shocked to see the ghost of his own late father during Hamlet’s encounter with his; in retrospect, Day-Lewis said that remark was a metaphor for how overwhelming an experience he found preparing for and playing Hamlet.  As a result, though, Elsinore rather gives the impression of diva behaviour, which seems unfair.  (Whatever happened that night, Daniel Day-Lewis has never since performed in theatre.)  It’s also unclear what’s happening when Charleson is laid up in hospital and seemingly doomed not to return to the production.  In fact, both Day-Lewis’s walk-off and Charleson’s pneumonia gave another fine actor, Jeremy Northam, his big chance:  Northam was Laertes in the production but temporarily promoted to Hamlet both times.  When Charleson rejoins the cast, Northam reverts to playing Laertes.  (He’s incarnated by Jamie Bogyo for the climactic sword fight with Hamlet.)

A bigger issue is how the film presents Charleson’s career trajectory and stage-versus-screen ambitions.  He says explicitly that he wanted to do films rather than plays.  The first half of Elsinore implies that by 1989 his acting career was going nowhere –  Chariots of Fire is eight years ago and he can’t get another decent cinema role.  Early on, Charleson’s friend Sean (Matthew Beard) assures him, ludicrously, that Chariots of Fire was ‘one of the most celebrated films of all time’; otherwise, the script works up a running joke that all that’s remembered of Chariots is the music (the script doesn’t mention that that was probably thanks largely to the BBC’s using the Vangelis theme for all their Summer Olympics programmes in 1984 and 1988).  The Charleson of Elsinore is reduced to auditioning for a rubbishy action movie and watching himself on a breakfast TV interview, explaining his recent role in a Dario Argento giallo, which is meant to sound ridiculous.

You wouldn’t guess from the film that Charleson was appearing in decent TV movies and drama or, more important to the story, in high-profile theatre well into the late 1980s.  These omissions may be deliberate – to make more salient that coming out as gay and maintaining a movie career were incompatible at the time – yet don’t make sense within the film’s overall scheme.  When Charleson is measured for his Hamlet costume at the National, the wardrobe person (Michele Austin) says the tailored suit he wore as Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls should still fit (though why would he wear it in a production of Hamlet that wasn’t remotely modern dress?)  This sequence is included mainly to get over that Charleson has lost weight recently – but also has the effect of suggesting that he hadn’t worked at the National since Guys and Dolls.  That was in 1982.  In fact, he’d played opposite Julie Walters in Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love at the Cottesloe in 1984-85; as recently as 1988, he was Brick Pollitt in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Lyttelton.  (I saw the former on its transfer to the West End, the latter at the National.)  On the evidence of Elsinore, it’s hard to understand why Richard Eyre (Johnny Flynn) is so keen for Charleson to replace Daniel Day-Lewis.  Once that happens, though, Stone and Beresford change tack, giving the impression that a second crack at Hamlet (he’d first played the role in his mid-twenties, in a touring production for the Cambridge Theatre Company) has long been the summit of Charleson’s ambition.

There’s no doubt that this abrupt U-turn moves the film to dramatically more fruitful ground.  The resonances between Charleson’s plight and Shakespeare’s morbid lines and scenes don’t need to be, and aren’t, overstressed:  Andrew Scott’s taste and integrity guarantee that even the most obvious convergence of life and art – Hamlet addressing Yorick’s skull – is, as well as compelling, rendered natural.  Addressing the cast at the start of rehearsals, Richard Eyre describes Hamlet as ‘a play about being alive and becoming dead’.  Elsinore’s most impressive achievement comes in showing Ian Charleson’s immersion in the character of deathbound Hamlet as an impassioned assertion of his acting gifts – and of self-assertion, that he’s alive, though not for much longer.  The film isn’t as grim as it may sound:  Stephen Beresford (whose only previous solo screenplay was Pride (2014)) is quite generous with the graveyard humour.  ‘If you’re going to play this part,’ Margaret Johnson tells Charleson, once she realises he won’t be dissuaded from doing so, ‘there’s to be no more talk of death’.  ‘That might be tricky – it’s one of the play’s central themes’, he replies.

That exchange features in the Elsinore trailer; Johnson’s rejoinder to Charleson doesn’t, though it’s another decent line – to the effect that she doesn’t need educating in what Hamlet’s about. Later, on finding him, when he’s meant to be resting, running lines with one of the ward staff (Ronke Adekoluejo) reading Ophelia, she dispatches the nurse with ‘Get thee to bedpans and blood tests’.  The film’s Margaret Johnson is an irresistible blend – almost comically no-nonsense yet thoroughly compassionate.  Olivia Colman, emotionally precise and funny, does her best work in cinema since Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter (2021).  Colman’s nuanced playing enhances moments that would otherwise just be OTT.  Nicholas (Joe Locke), a very young patient with an AIDS death sentence, has dreams of a career in musical theatre that won’t come true.  Charleson discovers in the ward’s supply of audiocassettes an Ethel Merman album and arranges a line-up of patients – including himself but with Nicholas at the centre – who lip-sync ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business’, complete with camp dance moves.  The sequence is saved by Colman’s face, as she watches the routine, unseen by the participants in it.  Margaret Johnson is eventually in the Olivier Theatre audience for Charleson’s Hamlet:  here too, Olivia Colman makes the doctor’s mixed feelings silently and eloquently clear.

Simon Stone has assembled a high-powered cast.  At and near the start, I wondered if this would result in numerous cameos with talented people making the most – too much – of their brief appearance.  In the event, that’s rarely a problem, sometimes because contributions aren’t as fleeting as I’d assumed they would be.  Some of the highlights are characters based on real people who aren’t well known.  That category includes, as well as Margaret Johnson, Linda Tolhurst, the National Theatre’s very long-serving stage door supervisor; she’s incarnated by brilliant Monica Dolan, whose every look and line are perfectly weighted.  Paul Chahidi also registers strongly, in the smaller role of Ralph, the dresser who first tells Charleson about the Johnson clinic.  Although Billie Piper – as Patsy Pollock, the casting director and friend who nursed Charleson at the end of his life – turns out to have more screen time than most, this doesn’t add up to much.

In the Hamlet cast, more famous names are played by familiar faces – Juliet Stevenson is Sylvia Syms as Gertrude (a role Stevenson also played to Andrew Scott’s Hamlet in 2017), Danny Webb is Michael Bryant as Polonius, David Rintoul is John Castle as Hamlet’s father’s ghost.  (Alyth Ross, whom I didn’t recognise, is Stella Gonet as Ophelia.)   At the top of the NT tree is Richard Eyre, the National’s artistic director at the time and the only person there in whom Charleson immediately confides about his illness, which doesn’t stop Eyre from giving him the big role.  Although the part of Eyre is shakily written, especially his opening address to the cast about Hamlet, Johnny Flynn does a good job with it.  Invented characters like AIDS patient Nicholas and Georgie (Luke Thompson), Charleson’s ex-lover, feel like composites.  So does Sean, even though he isn’t (I guessed this was the playwright and director Sean Mathias) and Matthew Beard is always worth watching.  Ditto Adeel Akhtar, though who knows why such a quality actor was needed for a thirty-second appearance as a man from whom Charleson buys a motor bike.

Montage overload just about wrecks the film’s closing scenes, as Simon Stone moves back and forth repeatedly between the Olivier stage and Ian Charleson’s deathbed.  Stefan Gregory’s overwrought, overused score, a problem throughout, makes matters worse.  In an early scene, Charleson explains to Patsy Pollock’s daughter (Sadie Soverall) an established ritual at the National Theatre, where the dressing rooms, arranged around a central interior space, have windows facing directly onto each other.  When an actor is called to the stage, other actors gather at and hammer on these windows in a show of support.  Elsinore seems to end about twenty times, and this ritual is one of the non-endings.  Even though it’s made to compete with Stefan Gregory’s music, the window-hammering is still a powerful sound and would have been, for more than one reason, a fitting finale.

When Charleson is laid low with pneumonia, his parents (Georgie Glen and (Peter Mullan) come down from Scotland to visit their son in hospital.  There’s a bit of uneasy conversation before the camera moves outside the room, to the other side of a glass partition:  we see but don’t hear him tell his mother and father, for the first time, that he’s gay, and that he has AIDS.  The stunned parents take their leave and stand outside in the hospital car park.  The episode seems to be going on for too long, yet when Peter Mullan breaks down in tears in the car park, the moment is not only affecting but also epitomises the film.  Simon Stone is determined to squeeze every drop from the tragedy of Ian Charleson.  In Elsinore‘s climax, Stone so exploits Andrew Scott’s talents that he’s fortunate not to kill the goose that lays the film’s golden eggs.  But that doesn’t happen because Scott keeps finding more – as Olivia Colman, Monica Dolan, Peter Mullan and others, in relatively minor ways, also keep doing.  For all its faults, Elsinore successfully pays tribute to a wonderful and singular actor.  Almost because of some of those faults, the film also salutes the resource of actors, plural.

9 October 2026