Riz Ahmed

It's elitist.

And I've got a government assisted place to a private school where I felt like an outsider for many different reasons.

And I was lucky enough to have an English teacher called Mr. Roseblade, who was a white Jewish middle-aged man from a different place in the UK.

I thought we had nothing in common, but he spoke fluent Punjabi.

And he...

brought me Hamlet and said, you know, this thing, this story, this character, it's at the heart of the establishment that you feel so alienated from in many ways.

But have a read of it.

You might recognize yourself in this character.

And I did, like millions of people have, right?

Hamlet being a character who feels out of place.

Hamlet himself feels like an outsider.

He feels like he doesn't belong, like no one understands.

And it really spoke to me as a teenager.

But more than that, what I realized was, hang on a minute, this Hamlet story,

set in medieval Denmark actually is exactly like growing up in Wembley.

This is about who you can and can't marry.

This is about everyone squabbling over the family business.

This is about the reality and lived experience of spirituality, ghosts and spirit possession, which is par for the course.

It's part of our lived experience culturally.

And this is also actually kind of pivots on a story point of marrying one's sister-in-law if your brother dies, which is a cultural tradition.