Hamlet and Headphones and: How Headphones Got Inside Jeremy McCarter’s Head and Inspired Him to Reimagine Shakespeare
I just returned from Comic-Con and explained to several vendors the mission of SeriousPop.Tech to explore interesting intersections between popular culture and technology. I recently listened to an episode of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s ‘Shakespeare Unlimited,’ which offered such a connection. Jeremy McCarter and his Make Believe Podcast produced an episodic audio-only version of Hamlet inspired by headphones. The conceit? The play is reduced not only to audio, but only to the audio that the Hamlet character was privy to.
The entire Hamlet podcast can be found here.
The Shakespeare Unlimited podcast interview that inspired this post can be listened to here:
Both podcasts are available on other podcasting services such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music.
Jeremy McCarter’s Hamlet doesn’t whisper from the stage—it speaks directly into your head. This production was born not from a lighting rig or a new stagecraft technique but from a pair of headphones. The director asked: What would happen if Hamlet’s world existed only where Hamlet himself stood? What if the audience didn’t witness Denmark as a kingdom but as a mind under siege? Headphones inspired McCarter to explore those questions.
The core creative leap came from the intimacy of personal audio. Headphones create a world where the listener becomes the sole occupant of the space between sound and self. McCarter leaned into that intimacy. He cut the play down to only the moments that Hamlet inhabits, stripping away the court intrigues that Shakespeare used to fill Elsinore with tension. Instead, this Hamlet lives entirely in his own head, his story unfolding through words and sounds that never step outside his awareness. For audiences, this changes the gravitational pull of the play. We aren’t spectators to a family tragedy. We’re eavesdroppers on a consciousness unraveling.
The headphones didn’t just inform the edit—they defined the sound design. Freed from the need to project across an auditorium, the production could whisper, crackle, and breathe. The creak of a floorboard or the echo of a distant footstep carries as much narrative weight as a soliloquy.
A voice can arrive from behind you, a ghost in stereo, brushing past your shoulder with its warning, a speaker can prattle on as an interior monologue takes shape. McCarter described working with his sound team to build a Denmark of the mind: an aural architecture of corridors, chambers, and battlements that exists only between the left and right channel. Through headphones, even silence becomes a dramatic tool—an empty space that Hamlet fills with suspicion, grief, or defiance.
This approach transforms the audience’s relationship to the play. Headphones isolate as much as they immerse. In a traditional theater, the collective gasp or laugh connects you to the crowd. Here, the connection is internal. The production asks each listener to sit alone with Hamlet, to experience the disorientation of his doubts and the starkness of his choices. Technology, in this case, doesn’t mediate the art; it becomes the art. The medium of delivery is the message.
The Sound’s the Thing
Jeremy McCarter didn’t just hand his Hamlet to headphones—he handed the play’s sonic soul to his sound engineer, Mikhail Fiksel. Rather than micromanage technology he didn’t fully command, McCarter described giving the engineer “the keys to the world inside Hamlet’s head.”
The engineer’s toolkit included binaural microphones, which capture audio the way human ears perceive it. Placing these mics in the rehearsal space allowed footsteps to approach from behind, whispers to sweep across the stereo field, and the ghost of Hamlet’s father to orbit the listener in chilling proximity. Every awkward giggle and labored breath carried emotional weight because it arrived in a three-dimensional soundscape that lived only in the audience’s head.
McCarter focused on the emotional map—paranoia, grief, isolation—while Fiksel transformed those feelings into layered sound environments. By ceding control, McCarter elevated the engineer to a co-author of the performance. McCarter may have crafted the narrative, but Fiskel engineered Hamlet’s auditory world.
The sound profile reflects a generation raised on podcasts, streaming music, and audiobooks. Every cue is engineered with the precision of a studio album. Breath, reverb, and directionality carry emotional meaning. It’s a Hamlet that could not have existed in Shakespeare’s time or even a decade ago. Modern headphones gave McCarter the confidence to design for the inner ear rather than the back row.
In the end, this production isn’t just a technical experiment. It’s a philosophical one. By framing Hamlet entirely through his own experience, the play becomes an inquiry into subjectivity. We don’t just watch Hamlet wrestle with “to be or not to be”—we inhabit the rhythm of his heart and the tremor of his fear. The technology collapses distance. It doesn’t bring Elsinore closer. It makes us residents of Hamlet’s haunted interior.
This is theater that belongs to the moment and the medium. A production like this reminds us that technology can do more than amplify or adorn; it can reshape narrative itself. McCarter’s headphones didn’t just inspire the play; they became the auditory window through which he produced it. And for two hours, Denmark isn’t a castle or a stage, it exists only as the waves of sound emanating from a pair of cups pressed gently against the ear, where one man’s doubt becomes the only world that matters.
You can doubt the stars are fire, you can doubt the sun moves, you can doubt truth and truth lies, but never doubt I love.
How Headphone Theater Changes Theater
Headphone theater changes more than the sound an audience experiences—it rewrites the social contract between the director and the audience. In a traditional play, the director orchestrates the gaze and flow, confident that every seat shares a common auditory and visual experience. Immersive audio fractures that control and introduces uncertainty.
When Jeremy McCarter handed the play to headphones, he eliminated communal experience and shared perception. Each listener sits inside their own acoustic bubble, free from the collective cues of laughter or silence that ripple through a theater. The director becomes less of a stage general and more of a host, inviting the audience into a private dialogue with Hamlet.
This intimacy makes the experience deeply personal but less controllable. A footstep behind one listener might feel like a ghostly warning; to another, it could feel like an accident about to happen. McCarter embraced this unpredictability, understanding that immersive audio demands trust, not just in the sound engineer, but in the audience’s willingness to co-create the theater experience even more than they usually do.
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