Elsinore

Simon Stone is an Australian theatre director whose radical reworkings of Ibsen, Lorca and Chekhov have run at the Barbican, the Odéon and the Vienna Burgtheater, and whose screen work includes The Daughter and Netflix's The Dig. Elsinore is his third feature, written by Stephen Beresford of Pride, and it takes as its subject Ian Charleson — the actor best remembered internationally for Chariots of Fire — and the Hamlet he played at the National Theatre in the last months of his life.

Andrew Scott plays Charleson, which is a piece of casting with its own resonance: Scott's own Hamlet, in 2017, is among the most admired of recent decades. Olivia Colman, Billie Piper and Johnny Flynn fill out a company that is largely playing real people, Flynn as the director Richard Eyre. Beresford's script keeps to the rehearsal room and the dressing room, and Stone directs it as a workplace film — the practical business of getting a production up while a central fact goes politely unspoken.

It premiered at Telluride in September 2026 and travelled straight to Toronto's Special Presentations and the opening night of the BFI London Film Festival. First reviews were strong, with critics broadly agreeing that Scott's performance transcends a familiar prestige-drama frame; Focus Features releases it in North America in November, StudioCanal in the UK the following January. It arrives as a companion piece to a small run of British films about the AIDS years — It's a Sin, Pride, Benediction — told from inside a profession that had to carry on performing.