HAMLET’S uncle, King Claudius, has always been an intriguing character for audiences and actors alike, so contradictory are the views about him.

To Hamlet, he’s an absolute creep – “the bloat king”, “a satyr” and a “serpent”. 

But to most people at the Danish court, Polonius, Laertes and the ambassadors, he’s a perfectly appropriate person to be running Denmark, even if he did marry his late brother’s wife a bit too quickly. And he’s a good bloke who’ll have a drink with you.

Of course, they don’t know he’s also a murderer, and thereby hangs the plot of Shakespeare’s most famous play.

Ray Chong Nee plays Claudius in Peter Evans’ updated version of “Hamlet” for Bell Shakespeare, set in a trendy 1960s Denmark and with Harriet Gordon-Anderson as Hamlet.

When I catch up with him, we don’t concentrate on the cross-gender casting. After all, Bell did it spectacularly well with Kate Mulvany as Richard III and Gordon-Anderson says she’s playing the melancholy Dane as a man, so that’s how Chong Nee will treat him/her.

We’re more interested in how he approaches the most famous wicked stepfather in theatrical history.

“I am who I am,” Chong Nee says, momentarily forgetting that he’s not really Claudius. “No one thinks they are absolutely evil, We all negotiate somethings, but my character is quintessentially human.”

As an actor building his character, he has to take into account what the fratricide king says and does as well as what other people say about him, but one thing he’s absolutely sure of is that Claudius is remorseful about having bumped off his older brother, Hamlet senior.

The other thing is he’s a man very much in love with his brother’s widow, Gertrude, played in this production by John Bell’s daughter, Lucy.

There are lots of impressive things about Claudius. He’s an astute politician and as Chong Nee points out, the script gives no indication that the court doesn’t want him to be their leader – they also agreed to his marriage with Gertrude.

Right from the start, there are barbs in the quips of Hamlet, whose problems with Claudius are motivated by his mother’s alacrity in jumping into bed with his uncle. But his objections can easily be seen as imagined.

Then the ghost of Hamlet senior turns up to set the wheels of revenge in motion.

Evans may have set it in the 1960s, but the theology is medieval, with the ghost unable to move on from Purgatory until he is released by an act of retribution.

To Chong Nee , in preparing his character, the deep religious undertones in the play are especially important.

In one of the two crucial scenes involving Claudius, we see him attempting to pray and seeking forgiveness, but famously, because he’s not prepared to give up the things he did the murder for – power and love – she finds himself unable to do so and says: “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go”. 

Chong Nee grew up as a Catholic and for many years, he says, fought his own battles, so he’s very familiar with the question of spiritual struggle.

Chong Nee’s Claudius is probably more intelligent than the deceased Hamlet senior, who was a man of war, but he’s no match for Hamlet, just back at the University of Wittenberg; he quickly foresees the king’s intent.

For all this, Claudius is a man with a heart, who says of Gertrude, “She’s so conjunctive to my life and soul, That, as the star moves not but in his sphere, I could not but by her,” and Hamlet’s coarse representation of the relationship between the couple tells us more about him than it does about them.

To make that relationship more credible, the decision was made by director Evans to make Claudius much younger than the ageing Hamlet senior – Chong Nee is a mere 38 years old.

Certainly, in the play Claudius is not granted the gracious death that Hamlet experiences, and dies a horrible death, but it’s lovely for an actor to play a villain, to “smile, and smile, and be a villain”.

“As actors, we strive to fill shoes we could not in real life,” Chong Nee says.

“Hamlet”, The Playhouse, April 7-16. Book at canberratheatrecentre.com