On an afternoon in July 1899, an audience crowded into the theatre in Stratford for a special event. The actor-manager Frank Benson was to give them the complete, uncut Hamlet, with himself as the Dane. It would start in the afternoon and run until the end of the closet scene, and conclude that evening with Acts IV and V. It was in all probability the first time the full text of Hamlet had been performed. It became known in Stratford as the “Eternity” Hamlet: the first marathon Shakespeare Day.

Now, I am directing the play with David Tennant, in the Courtyard Theatre in Stratford. It's pretty safe to assume that there will be a younger element in the audience, attracted to Stratford and to Shakespeare perhaps for the first time, by David's Doctor Who popularity. If I chose to do my own “Eternity” Hamlet I would almost certainly frighten away many of that constituency. On the other hand I don't want to patronise them either. For me, Shakespeare goes at about 900 lines an hour, if spoken “trippingly on the tongue”, as Hamlet himself advises. We know plays at the original Globe started at around 2pm, and that they had to be over between 4pm and 5pm. As there were no intervals back then, that suggests the plays could stretch to a maximum of maybe 2,700 lines, three hours' playing time.

So just how long is Shakespeare's longest play? Well, it's not that easy to determine, as there is no definitive text. The first Quarto of Hamlet (the paperback edition, if you like) comes in at about 2,200 lines, which is just over two hours' traffic of the stage. But it is notoriously inaccurate, and contains lines such as: “To be or not to be, aye, there's the point.” Nevertheless, it may be an indication of the sort of length and structure that Shakespeare's company played.

The second Quarto, published a couple of years later, is a staggering 3,900 lines long, and running at least four hours and 20 minutes (that's without any extra time added for sword fights or intervals) would bring a modern audience back out on to the streets well after midnight. The version printed in the First Folio (the collected works published after Shakespeare's death) is a little shorter.

Times Archive, 1899: Madame Bernhardt's Hamlet

No-one who is an admirer of Mme. Bernhardt's wonderful art and wonderful personality will come away disappointed

• Hamlet at Elsinore, 1937

• Hamlet at the Old Vic, 1977

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Some directors cut the opening scene on the battlements. Others cut Voltemand and Cornelius, the ambassadors to Norway, and Polonius's spy, Reynaldo, is frequently elbowed out. But all these characters reinforce the politics of the play, and the familiar world of hypersurveillance that operates in Elsinore. Then there's Fortinbras, the action hero who happens to wander into the body-strewn court and ends the play. He often gets the boot. But he provides the play's international perspective, and opens out the play from the claustrophobia of Denmark.

One scene (which, although in the Second Quarto, was kicked out of the Folio) contains one of the play's most resonant modern images: Fortinbras's huge army being mobilised against a tiny part of Poland, which in itself is worthless. They are fighting for an eggshell, at a potential cost of millions and the loss of 20,000 lives. It is easy to cut from a narrative point of view but it deepens the context of Hamlet's indecision.

In our Hamlet, we've cut the play-within-a-play quite drastically, but unless you know Hamlet intimately you probably won't notice that. We've kept the opening battlements scene and Fortinbras, Voltemand, Cornelius and Reynaldo. Perhaps the most radical thing we've done is move the “To be or not to be” speech from after the point at which the players arrive at Elsinore to before, to the moment just after Hamlet has seen the ghost of his father. It is the cold light of day. He is in a bleak place. It feels more psychologically “right” than in the versions that have that speech occurring after his spirited attempts to expose Claudius.

Deciding what to cut depends on what your priorities are. As Jan Kott wrote in Shakespeare Our Contemporary, an inevitably shortened Hamlet “will always be a poorer Hamlet than Shakespeare's Hamlet is; but it may also be a Hamlet enriched by being in our time”.

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