Shakespeare takes the train: when the tragedies get off in our city
What if Coriolanus put in his earbuds and opened X? What if Hamlet stared at the ceiling of a flat in the concrete city, unable to decide anything? What if Richard III had a modern fake-news machine at his fingertips?
That is exactly the question behind the new podcast series Shakespeare in the Metro, a production of Dromos Theatre and Medea Pictures, hosted and narrated by director Emmanouil Mavros. The premise is simple and quietly subversive: take the classics down off the dusty library shelf, board them onto the city’s trains, and ask how far Shakespeare’s cities really are from our own digital everyday life.
Episode by episode, the answer is: barely any distance at all.
Six tragedies, six wounds of the modern city
Season 1 runs for six episodes, each pairing a Shakespearean play with a defining tension of our time.
In Episode 1, Coriolanus meets the digital mob. A war hero who bled for his country but refuses to smile for the cameras becomes the perfect portrait of the person society “cancels.” Populism, mass outrage and the fall of the leader in an age when the crowd worships you one day and devours you the next.
In Episode 2, Hamlet becomes the face of urban depression. “Denmark’s a prison” — and with it the whole world. “To be or not to be” is read here as existential paralysis: the inability of an entire generation to act inside a system that crushes it.
In Episode 3, Macbeth is the ultimate study of ambition — the ruthless climb through the corporate and political world, the breaking of every sacred rule to reach the top, and the discovery that power brings not peace but paranoia and total isolation.
In Episode 4, Richard III is theatre’s most seductive villain and its first spin doctor. With no popular love and no legitimate claim to the crown, he wins power through language, deception and manufactured narratives — a lesson in media manipulation and the question underneath it all: can a lie last forever?
In Episode 5, King Lear speaks to the isolation of old age. An ageing father hands over his power and, the moment he loses it, becomes a burden — neglected, cast out into the storm. It may be the most urgent episode of all for a society that struggles to care for its elderly.
In Episode 6, Romeo and Juliet is revealed not as a romance but as a political tragedy — a society in a state of civil war, with class borders and polarised camps, where the love of two young people becomes the tragic price of their elders’ hatred.
Why now
Shakespeare wasn’t writing about kings and dukes; he was writing about us. The great revelation of the series is how little the human being has changed: the same hunger for power, the same fear of the mob, the same loneliness, the same hatred passed down the generations. Only the set has changed — from the palace to the metro carriage, from the pulpit to the timeline.
With atmospheric sound design and live theatrical excerpts, Shakespeare in the Metro is not a literature lecture. It is an invitation to hear the classics as if they had been written this morning — because, in a way, they were.
Season 1 will be available on October 2nd 2026. Follow on Spotify, listen, and travel with us.
Language: Greek