Now Harriet Gordon-Anderson takes on what she calls the role of a lifetime, playing the lead in the Bell Shakespeare production of Hamlet, opening in Canberra on April 7.

"While I am in favour of creating new work and work that reflects the time we live in, now that I've had some experience of playing Hamlet, I just don't know if I will ever play a role that is as well written as this one," she says.

"He is just incredible, the depth of the work in this play is phenomenal, it's the best play I've ever read, it just gets deeper and deeper every time I read it."

The cast has had almost three years to get to know their characters. Casting was announced in 2019 and four shows into the March 2020 premiere at the Sydney Opera House, Hamlet was abruptly shut down. They returned to the rehearsal room last year, but the Delta variant shut things down again.

"We've been working on this for almost three years now but I still feel like I'm scraping the surface of the poetry and the fragmented kind of kaleidoscopic meanings behind each image that Hamlet uses, or that the characters in this play choose to use," Gordon-Anderson says.

"It's made me a better actor, it is really the role of a lifetime, and I'm trying to savor it and be aware that I may not ever have this experience again."

The lead-in has given Gordon-Anderson time to mull over the criticism the company received when they announced a woman would be playing the role of Hamlet. The first recorded female Hamlet was Charlotte Clarke's London performance in the early 18th century. French actress Sarah Bernhardt was the first Hamlet on film in 1900.

"It baffles me that it's of concern to anyone," she says. "There are still people who would prefer not to have a woman in this role, but that's beyond my control. All I can do, all we can do in this production, is add another colour to the tapestry that is Hamlet."

She did make time to talk to Kate Mulvaney, whose role as Richard III in the Bell Shakespeare 2018 season pushed boundaries and won her several awards, including the Helpmann Awards as best female actor in a play.

"Kate said to be prepared, that people would want to talk about the strangeness of it, the inappropriateness of it, but to back myself all the way."

Gordon-Anderson has been performing since she was a teenager, a talented musician and dancer she went to Newtown High School of the Performing Arts and remembers falling in love with drama in about year nine.

It was around then too that she got her first taste of Shakespeare. How many hormone-fuelled teenagers read Romeo and Juliet in high school without realising the Bard was writing about them?

Gordon-Anderson remembers studying Macbeth early on.

"I was a drama nerd and even though I was interested in words, in text, I did find it difficult and a bit stuffy at times. I had the impression that it was something that had to be revered because it was a classic text.

"But I remember the Bell Shakespeare education team coming to our school and helping us break it down into stories of love and heartache and violence and sword fights.

"That was really helpful for me, to just pull it down from the sky a little bit, and see it just on the level of a play."

She remembers too when her parents bought her the complete works of Shakespeare.

"I was about 14 or 15, and I didn't understand a lot of what I was reading, but I remember reaching the end of Othello, when he is talking about the heartbreak of realising he's just killed his great love life and I just thought, wow, would I ever experience a love like this, would that love be worthy of this language of these feelings?

"Trying to put such huge feelings into words made me fall in love with Shakespeare."

In many way, director Peter Evans has stripped this version of Hamlet back to a story about love, a family drama if you like, of loss and redemption.

"From what I know of Pete's thoughts on the production is that he was very interested in looking at Hamlet as a memory play, as a nostalgic experience."

The costuming suggests a 1960s feel, Super 8 film of a young Hamlet on family holidays is projected onto a back wall, the set is minimalistic against a backdrop of pine trees and falling snow.

"It really helps to bring a sense of domestic tragedy to this play ... we've done with the political subplot to some extent and this is a family drama, the personal feelings of Hamlet himself.

"You can see Hamlet 1000 ways but this production is very personal, with very deep feelings, and very domestic."