Simon Stone turns his theatre-directing method on a real life for the first time in Elsinore, opening the BFI London Film Festival's seventieth edition at the Royal Festival Hall.
Simon Stone’s Elsinore opens the seventieth BFI London Film Festival at the Royal Festival Hall on Wednesday 7 October 2026, the first of the Festival’s red-carpet galas this year.
Stone was born in Basel in 1984, grew up in Australia and made his name in the theatre by rewriting canonical plays from the ground up rather than staging them. He founded the Hayloft Project in his twenties and remounted its Spring Awakening at Belvoir St Theatre in 2008, and he has since taken Ibsen and Chekhov apart and reset them in the present. His Yerma at the Young Vic in 2016, with Billie Piper in the title role, ran twice in London before transferring to the Park Avenue Armory in New York.
Elsinore follows the actor Ian Charleson preparing to play Hamlet at the National Theatre while facing considerable personal odds, so Stone has turned his method on a real life for the first time. Stephen Beresford wrote it, and the cast brings Andrew Scott, Olivia Colman, Billie Piper, Johnny Flynn, Juliet Stevenson and Peter Mullan into one film, Piper’s presence a direct line back to the stage work that made his name.
The European premiere opens the Festival on the evening of 7 October, with receptions either side of the screening, and the film repeats in the same hall two nights later, on Friday 9 October.