Commuters travelling between Surrey and London by train in recent weeks might have borne witness to a rather unusual scene: Alistair Petrie, the distinctive British actor known as Sex Education’s buttoned-up headmaster Mr Groff, reciting lines of Shakespeare under his breath and surrounded by scrawled notes. “I don’t care if people think I’m a lunatic,” he says with a goofy laugh. “There’s a sort of unwritten etiquette about commuting that seems to permeate, but I’m just there, on a busy train, muttering Shakespeare. So I guess I’m part of the zoo!”
In case you hadn’t guessed, the 54-year-old is actually starring in a Shakespeare play – Robert Hastie’s production of Hamlet, at the National Theatre. Olivier winner Hiran Abeysekera is the tragic hero, and Petrie is cramming his lines on the 8:28 service to Waterloo for the prince’s uncle and nemesis, Claudius, King of Denmark. “Early on, I decided that Claudius doesn’t know that the play is called Hamlet,” says Petrie, as he sips a cup of tea in a light-filled office in the National. “To him, the play’s called Claudius, and he’s in a tragedy of his own. He has ascended to the throne through, admittedly, a rather nefarious methodology, but he’s been waiting to do this almost all his life. He’s been the spare, but now he’s the king.” Essentially, Claudius has what would be known in modern parlance as “main character energy”.
