"This is the eighth Hamlet I've worked on. I've acted in it many times and this is the third time I've worked on it from a directorial point of view."

But despite, or perhaps because of, this enduring and intense connection, he says, "it never ceases to fulfil and reveal".

Hamlet (played by Josh McConville) is the Prince of Denmark whose father has died and appears to him as a ghost (Sean O'Shea) instructing him to avenge his murder. It seems the killer was the late king's brother Claudius (O'Shea), now married to his former sister-in-law Gertrude (Doris Younane). Add to this Hamlet's unsteady relationship with Ophelia (Matilda Ridgway) and the ever-present threat both from within Denmark and without, and it's clear this Dane has good reason to be melancholy.

In this Bell Shakespeare production – the first to come to Canberra since company founder John Bell stepped down, leaving Peter Evans as sole artistic director – Ryan says he wants to focus particularly on an aspect of Hamlet that is often neglected, while paying due attention to the family drama.

"I wanted to tell the story – it's one of Shakespeare's better stories, a complete piece of theatre, with a political thriller at the heart of it that's often reduced or cut. In most productions, more than half of the ones I've seen, it's reduced and you get the domestic tragedy."

Ryan says he wants to show Hamlet's personal struggles in their wider political framework and to deal with the story in a contemporary way.

"It allows the man playing Hamlet to not just be a whining brat because his mother remarried but a consciousness rebelling against larger forces that are impinging on his freedom of thought."

The Denmark in this production is, he says, like a country embroiled in a Cold War or a police state like Elizabethan England was then or like North Korea is now where surveillance is rife and freedom of thought is not tolerated. The political and the personal are inextricably intertwined.

"There's a cold, elegiac quality to the way the story is told. The play is very funny but there's an undercurrent of immense grief."

Ryan says McConville is "one of the finest young actors of the current generation in Australia" and says he is up to the demands of the role, being "an extraordinarily gifted clown" as well as "a fearsome force of nature – so visceral, so physical with the role and so daring physically" – and able to convey the prince's deep feelings of sorrow.

If the personal aspects of the story tend to overwhelm the political in many productions, perhaps that's because they seem to for Hamlet, too. He seems much less concerned about becoming king and the security of Denmark than about the fact his mother married his uncle – although this becomes understandable when, it turns out, he and we discover Claudius murdered Hamlet's father to gain the throne and Gertrude's hand.

"We see the worst of him – we don't see what he once was," Ryan says.

"We see flashes of a brilliant boy."

Hamlet is a role to which many great actors have been drawn over the centuries and the play is often described as not only Shakespeare's best but the greatest ever written. Apart from its abundance of memorable lines – it's been described as "a play full of quotes" – it's also a play filled with uncertainties and questions making it endlessly ripe for renewal and reinterpretation. Shakespeare was not profligate with stage directions or annotations to his scripts so a lot of interpretation is required by directors and actors – and never more so than in Hamlet.

"Every major scene has a unique ambiguity at the centre of it," Ryan says.

For example, Ryan points to the eternal question of whether Hamlet is mad or not. Unlike Ophelia, who unquestionably loses her sanity, Hamlet may or may not be feigning a loss of reason to protect himself by keeping his stepfather and his cronies off guard. But there are times it seems he genuinely goes over the edge.

"At three points he slips into psychotic moments, all to do with women: his assault on Ophelia; his attack on his mother in the closet; and leaping into his girlfriend's grave."

But how far does he slip and what does it mean? – aye, there's the rub, as Hamlet himself says in another context.

Then there's the matter of the ghost of Hamlet's father. It's not a vision that appears only to Hamlet – other people see it too – but Gertrude, the widow now married to her dead husband's brother, can't see it, for some reason not explained. Perhaps the ghost can control who seems him and when? Perhaps he doesn't want to tip off his "unfaithful" spouse?

Ryan says he is thrilled to be bringing another Bell Shakespeare play to Canberra – his Henry V, set during the London Blitz, was at the Playhouse last year – and this Hamlet, featuring a cast of six men and four women will be seen at the end of its tour, a well-settled production.

While there are 10 in the cast, only one of them is Hamlet. McConville is 29, only a year younger than the character is described in the play. It's the first time he's played the Prince of Denmark and he says it's one of the most challenging theatrical roles because of its range, encompassing a wide variety of emotion, physicality and even sword fighting.

McConville says, "If you can get on top of it, it's a very great learning curve for an actor."

He has worked with Bell Shakespeare before: he played Edgar in King Lear, another contender for the title of greatest Shakespearean play and sees similarities between the two plays with their themes of familial loss, death and insanity.

In researching Hamlet he watched other actors' versions including Mel Gibson, Kenneth Branagh and David Tennant and spoke to some actors who have played the role such as Toby Schmitz.

Regarding the latter, McConville says he would call them especially when he was "panicky about learning lines" but the main advice he seems to have received was "to have fun".

As he says, the actors and their portrayals are all very different so he didn't get caught up in what particular performers did.

"You can't try to copy someone else – that's harder than it sounds."

And McConville thought a lot about the play and the character.

He doesn't think Hamlet is mad – "he's one of the most sane characters in the play" – and says Ophelia's mad scene shows us what true madness is. But he thinks that the pressures and problems do eventually get to Hamlet and "eventually he is quite insane, but not mad". "What is mad?" McConville says he also can't look at Hamlet as a misogynist spoilt brat, as some have done.

"I've got to sympathise with him," he says – and not just because he's playing the character.

"He's suffering from serious depression, he's lost the love of his life, his father ... and he's being told to suppress his grief ... He can't do it."

It turns out, of course, that there's good reason for his being more than unusually unhappy about what's happened – but figuring out what to do about it is a challenge.

McConville says he is learning a lot from playing Hamlet and not just about acting.

"He shows Shakespeare's intelligence with philosophy and character. There are so many things within the lines."

Even a seemingly hackneyed speech like the "To be or not to be" soliloquy, approached afresh, offers profound insights and questions into the nature of life and death, he says. And despite touring for months already, his enthusiasm for the role hasn't dimmed.

"It's a great time – I'd probably like to do it again."

Hamlet is at the Playhouse, Canberra Theatre Centre, from October 13 to 24. Bookings: canberratheatrecentre.com.au or 6275 2700.