RSC Reveals Gruesome Truth of Tennant’s Skull???

It has been revealed that the skull held aloft by David Tennant during his recent turn as Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company was a real one, and belonged to a concert pianist who died of cancer in 1982.

According to the Daily Mail, Andre Tchaikovsky, a holocaust survivor who settled in the UK, made it a condition of his will that his skull be given away in the hope it would be used as a theatre prop. It was duly given to the RSC, where it has been used in rehearsals over the years but never before in performance.

David Howells, curator of the RSC archive where the skull is kept, revealed: “In 1989 … Mark Rylance rehearsed with it for quite a while but he couldn’t get past the fact it wasn’t Yorick’s, it was Andre Tchaikovsky’s. That, and the fear of an accident and it being slightly macabre, was why they decided not to use it and used an exact replica.”

Gregory Doran, director of Tennant’s Hamlet, said that he kept the use of the skull a company secret during the course of the run, which finished in Stratford on 15 November, for fear the revelation would “topple the play and it would be all about David acting with a real skull”. He referred to the decision to use Tchaikovsky’s skull as a “little shock tactic”, though didn’t reveal whether it would be used during the production’s London season, which opens at the Novello Theatre next month (9 December 2008, previews from 3 December).

It is thought to be the first time a real skull has been used in a production of Hamlet since the 19th Century.