Dead on Cue

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Has Shakespeare’s longest, most challenging and arguably greatest play ever been more popular? Last year’s acclaimed RSC adaptation set aboard the doomed Titanic was followed by the spellbinding musical and dramatic fusion of Hamlet with Radiohead’s seminal album, Hail to the Thief. The tragedy poignantly threads its way through the acclaimed 2020 Maggie O’Farrell novel, Hamnet, becoming first a play in 2023 before hitting the big screens in January this year. Aneil Karia’s visceral cinematic reimagining was released last Friday. There is clearly a voracious appetite for the melancholy Dane, his tortured, existential angst in a rotten, corrupted world seemingly resonating with modern audiences more than ever.

To this thriving canon we can also add this gripping one-man show, first performed, appropriately enough, at The Bear Pit Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in April last year. Written by and starring Mark Carey, Dead on Cue is a deliciously traditional ghost story, a spooky thriller set in the same dressing room of the same theatre, where the same play – Hamlet, of course – is being performed, sixty years apart.

Carey has a rich pedigree of successful one-handed shows. Act One sees him monologuing as fading East End music-hall star Bertie Tindall, resentfully relegated to the minor role of the gravedigger in a 1958 stage production which features fictional rising star Claude Mason as the Prince of Denmark. Tindall’s intriguing tale lays a number of clues for the second act, set sixty-five years later, with Carey this time cast as Hamish Fife, promoted to understudy and the ghost of Old Hamlet, with the beknighted Mason, now an ageing theatrical legend, still occupying the lead role. Yet Tindall and Fife’s narratives have even more in common than we initially realise as secrets long since buried in the old dressing room under the stage come ominously to light. A versatile and talented performer with over forty years’ experience of stage and screen, Carey skilfully presents two very different but richly characterised monologues whilst also interchanging seamlessly between several additional minor characters when needed.

Carey’s writing is equally impressive. Much like the late Tom Stoppard’s existential tragicomedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, where these two doomed characters perform around, as well as in, Hamlet, Carey’s play’s great strength lies in the cleverness of the script: the writer delicately weaves strands of Shakespeare’s text into the narrative as the ‘onstage’ Hamlet takes place offstage, à la Noises Off, disembodied voices from an intercom system connecting to the dressing room in the bowels of the theatre and fuelling the play’s taut, supernatural mood. Fittingly for Shakespeare’s most ghostly play, Dead On Cue has the spinechilling feel of an MR James story brought to life on stage. Some simple, low-budget, yet highly effective technical trickery means the show has some creepy surprises up its sleeve. Kevin Oliver Jones’ original score and producer Giles Shenton’s sound design are suitably sinister, while the edge of your seat, where you may well find yourself at times, is conveniently just inches from the action, the fifty-seat Irving Studio the perfectly intimate venue for this tense and unsettling tale.

Dead on Cue is an understated gem that cleverly holds a distorted mirror, obliquely, up to Shakespeare’s original play, exploring many of the same themes, yet it also stands alone as a gripping ghostly tale with an unexpected final twist. Talking of mirrors, you may well also think twice before looking in one when you get home.

★★★★☆  Tony Clarke   13 February 2026

Monologues are curious beasts. They’ve become popular in recent years, not least because they cut down on production and touring costs. But they place considerable demands on the actor, who has to perform many roles in one show, shifting effortlessly between them, and often talking directly to the audience as well. If all the world’s a stage, then the lone actor has to occupy many of them at the same time. Only the best can do it.

Mark Carey is a master of the art, with a string of one man and small ensemble shows behind him. His latest show, Dead on Cue, recently performed at The Bear Pit Theatre, Stratford upon Avon, April 23-25, 2025, in partnership with Giles Shenton Productions, gave us an insight into his art in full flow.

Written by Mark, it is a ghost story set in the dressing room of a London theatre, spanning two generations sixty five years apart. The play in common is Hamlet, and the key characters are Bertie Tindall and Hamish Fife, minor character actors both, and Claude, later Sir Claude Mason, Shakespearean actor in the grand style. The three have a relationship that is only gradually revealed in a clever plot that is soaked in Shakespearean references and keeps one guessing till the end, when a ghostly twist is revealed that is surprising, scary and ultimately satisfying. 

Mark’s track record includes What’s Wrong With Benny Hill, a touching and revelatory play about the comic who was a huge hit with British audiences in the 1970s, until he fell from grace, cut down by a new breed of more abrasive comedy that left his own, rooted in music hall, behind. Dead On Cue owes much to music hall, with Bertie’s shy and tender ‘boom-boom’ jokes delivered almost apologetically, drawn from his days treading the boards of a hundred half-empty theatres up and down the country. Mark has a soft spot for the gentle loser who nevertheless sees all and can tell all too, when the opportunity arises. With a sharp wit hidden within the soft tones he punctures the pomposity of many typical grandees of the theatre. 

In the second half Mark plays Hamish Fife, a notch or two further up the theatrical ladder from his predecessor Bertie. Now he is playing understudy and the Ghost in Hamlet. But old memories hidden in the walls of the dressing room refuse to be silent, with specular and eerie results.

The atmosphere throughout is creepily claustrophobic, as it should be in the bowels of a theatre, where the air is saturated with the memories of old scores and strong emotions. It’s a tale many a thespian will recognise.

Dead on Cue is being delivered up and down the country, along with many other Giles Shenton productions, in a programme of shows that recalls the heyday of Rep’, when companies travelled up and down the country, staying in dingy hotels and B&Bs, always on the move. Maybe things are a little more comfortable now, but Mark Carey and Giles Shenton Productions keep a noble tradition of entertainment alive.