Ritu Rai is currently headlining a groundbreaking new project: a modern digital adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet , titled “Hamlet: The Indian Mewar” . This new web series reimagines the Danish prince’s tragedy against the backdrop of a contemporary Indian empire, with Rai playing a dual role—Ophelia and a new, never-seen-before narrator figure named “Kajri.”
If you're looking for more information on Ritu Rai or her work, I'd be happy to help!
Back in London, reviews began to call her "the actress who taught Shakespeare new tricks." It sounded glib, but something in the phrase fit: she had not modernized the Bard for clicks; she had invited him to sit cross-legged on the floor and pass around a smartphone. Offers came — a streaming series about a lawyer, an indie film about sisters in a coastal village — but Ritu kept saying yes mostly to projects that bent language: plays that asked actors to text in iambic pentameter, webseries that hid poetry inside code comments, radio dramas that were recorded as voicemail confessions.
Fame is a weather system; it arrives quietly and then floods in. Messages arrived — praise, offers, and a curious one from a small-town school in Mumbai asking if she would speak to students about Shakespeare. Ritu agreed. She had never forgotten the teacher who read Hamlet to them beneath a single bare bulb. She boarded the plane with the paperback in her carry-on.
Will the purists relent? Perhaps not. But as Rai herself tweeted last week: “If Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be writing for Netflix. And he’d cast me.”