After ‘Hamlet’ and ‘King Lear,’ Where Else Can Paapa Essiedu Go?

LONDON — No one from the Royal Shakespeare Co. was sure if Paapa Essiedu would have time for an interview recently. He was busy rehearsing the title role in “Hamlet” while also preparing for “King Lear,” in which he is playing Edmund alongside Antony Sher.

Both productions were about to travel to the United States: “King Lear” runs through April 29 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and “Hamlet” arrives at the Kennedy Center in Washington on May 2. But eventually Essiedu was able to find a time to talk, between the cool-down from one play and the warm-up for the other. He wasn’t being difficult; this was just how it was.

For a man with so much on his plate, Essiedu seemed to be operating on another, more relaxed plane entirely. Ambling into his dressing room at the Hackney Empire theater here — it was filled with a boyish clutter of discarded drink cartons and unwashed T-shirts — he admitted that, yes, the last few weeks had been a bit extreme.

“But that’s exciting, right?” he said with a slow grin. “Busy is good.”

A little more than a decade ago, Essiedu, 27, was in high school and had a grand total of one production to his name: a Christmas pageant when he was 8. These days, he is regarded as one of the brightest young stars in British theater. A 2015 production of “Romeo and Juliet” at Tobacco Factory Theaters in Bristol, not long after he left drama school, offered a taste of his remarkable talents. Instead of the moonstruck lover usually on display, this Romeo was a mixture of wide-eyed charm and hot-blooded passion.

But his Hamlet, which originally opened in Stratford-upon-Avon two years ago and has since been on a British tour, has cemented his reputation. The Guardian called the production “spiritually refreshing.” A critic for The Telegraph declared, “I’d say it’s 99.9 percent certain that within five years Essiedu will be a major star.” In London, there has been excitement on social media and long lines outside the theater’s box office.

Essiedu was politely reluctant to dwell on this, preferring to deliberate on the differences between Edmund and Hamlet and speculate on the boundlessness of Shakespeare’s imaginative geography. This “Hamlet” is set not in Denmark, but somewhere that looks like contemporary West Africa, filled with colorful Batik prints, razor-sharp tailoring and Yoruba drumming.

Hamlet has just graduated as an overseas student at the University of Wittenberg, Ohio, when he’s abruptly called home by his father’s death. We sense that he is struggling with culture shock as much as raw grief. (Though there is certainly plenty of the latter.)

The concept developed during discussions Essiedu had with the director, Simon Godwin, who saw his “Romeo” and felt he had the range to tackle the most demanding role in the canon. Essiedu was born and grew up in London, but both of his parents were Ghanaian and his attachment to the country remains strong. His father, who stayed in Ghana, died when he was 14; his mother, who raised him on her own, died seven years ago. “He’s lived a lot for someone of his age,” Godwin said.

When they began discussing the role of Hamlet, Essiedu had recently returned from a trip to Ghana and was fascinated by similarities between Shakespeare’s world, poised between many different political and faith systems, and that of present-day West Africa. But he was also mindful of how they could use this device to speak to audiences from different cultural backgrounds. “We bang on about Shakespeare being universal and timeless,” Essiedu said. “But until you produce his plays in ways that are accessible, that doesn’t mean anything.”

When he stepped onstage as Hamlet, Essiedu became the first actor of color to play the Danish prince at the Royal Shakespeare Co.; in another first for the company, the cast alongside him was almost entirely nonwhite. “There’s such diversity of talent out there,” Godwin said. “We wanted to create a production that reflected that.”

Essiedu is certainly part of a remarkable cohort: He went to drama school with writer and actor Michaela Coel, creator of the TV show “Chewing Gum,” and admitted to being in awe of his slightly older contemporary Daniel Kaluuya, who grew up not far away in North East London and was recently nominated for an Academy Award.

“It’s really exciting to know that a lot of my peers will be the Judi Denches, the Mark Rylances, of 10 years’ time,” he said.

But Essiedu, though pleased with how much more open the theater world is than even a few years ago, still seemed frustrated by the pace of change, which he said was “glacial.”

“It’s so important,” he added. “The way we live our lives is informed by what we see. And if stories of all kinds don’t appear, it’s like they don’t exist.”

Once his work with “Lear” and “Hamlet” is done in May, Essiedu said, he won’t have anything immediate scheduled (at least that he could discuss). Last year he had a cameo in Kenneth Branagh’s film “Murder on the Orient Express,” and he recently finished filming a TV drama, “Press,” by the playwright and screenwriter Mike Bartlett (“King Charles III”), that will air his year on the BBC, before heading to PBS in the United States.

He will also make an appearance in “The Forgiving Earth,” Hugo Blick’s much-anticipated war crimes thriller set partly in Ghana. It, too, is scheduled for release this year.

Godwin said he hoped Essiedu would continue to do theater work, even if movie or TV producers came calling. “There’s a line of classical roles for Paapa, if he wants to play them,” he said. “The canon is wide open.”

But Essiedu said he just wanted to take his career day by day.

“I look back over the past decade and realize how one opportunity has led to another one,” he said. “A huge part of that’s luck, but it’s also about having the openness and readiness to take those opportunities when they come.”