The Stratford Festival cast a female actor, Amaka Umeh, as Hamlet in its 2020 production. The client requested that the image include a skull. There's always a way to make an old cliché feel fresh, and we suggested that Amaka could be looking at an x-ray. The old negative film x-rays that medical staff examine on a light box are more or less obsolete now — replaced by digital technology — so we were very lucky to find a rare film x-ray of of a head and upper body — a visual metaphor for the play's universal "What a piece of work is a man" humanism.
