Hamlet after Deconstruction (Adaptation in Theatre and Performance) 3030968057, 9783030968052

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ADAPTATION IN THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE

Hamlet after Deconstruction Aneta Mancewicz

Adaptation in Theatre and Performance

Series Editors Vicky Angelaki, Humanities and Social Sciences, Mid Sweden University, Sundsvall, Sweden Kara Reilly, Department of Drama, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

The series addresses the various ways in which adaptation boldly takes on the contemporary context, working to rationalise it in dialogue with the past and involving the audience in a shared discourse with narratives that form part of our artistic and literary but also social and historical constitution. We approach this form of representation as a way of responding and adapting to the conditions, challenges, aspirations and points of reference at a particular historical moment, fostering a bond between theatre and society.

Aneta Mancewicz

Hamlet after Deconstruction

Aneta Mancewicz Royal Holloway University of London London, UK

ISSN 2947-4043 ISSN 2947-4051 (electronic) Adaptation in Theatre and Performance ISBN 978-3-030-96805-2 ISBN 978-3-030-96806-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96806-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Hamlet’s Lunacy by CREW (KVS, 2019), photo by CREW © Eric Joris This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Anna and Nina

Acknowledgments

When writing this book, I received inspiration and support from many colleagues, friends, and family. I would like to thank Małgorzata Sugiera for careful and constructive feedback on early drafts. Discussions about theatre and technology with the late Jerzy Limon, particularly during international conferences and festivals that he so brilliantly organised in Gdansk, ´ have greatly stimulated my work. I am also grateful for insightful comments I received from several colleagues and friends: Tom Cartelli, Anna Maria Cimitile, Benjamin Fowler, Eric Joris, Chiel Kattenbelt, Chris ´ atkowska, and Alexandra Portmann. Megson, Robin Nelson, Wanda Swi˛ This book has benefitted from their expertise, perceptiveness, and collegiality. Moreover, I want to thank Tom Bishop, Andy Lavender, Peter Marx, Eirini Nedelkopoulou, and Ralf Remshardt for their kindness and encouragement. Several artists and arts administrators have shared materials with me, and I would like to acknowledge their generosity. Jennifer Thomas, Alice Birch’s agent, sent me a copy of Birch’s ‘Performance Score OZ,’ a script of Ophelias Zimmer. Eric Joris, CREW’s Artistic Director, gave me access to the company’s performance materials and permission to use an image from Hamlet’s Lunacy on the book’s cover. Settimio Pisano, Scena Verticale’s Executive Director, provided me with a video recording and a published copy of the company’s Kitsch Hamlet. The book revises and extends research that I initially published in Polish in the monograph Biedny Hamlet! Kraków: Ksi˛egarnia Akademicka

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Press, Copyright 2010 (reproduced by permission of the publisher) and in an article in English ‘“To what base uses we may return”: Deconstruction of Hamlet in Contemporary Drama,’ The Shakespearean International Yearbook 12: 133–152, Copyright 2012 by Routledge Imprint (reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Group). I am very grateful for these permissions. Finally, I would like to thank my loving family. My parents, Halina and Wiesław, offered me invaluable practical support. My husband, Salvatore, gave me feedback and encouragement. My daughters, Anna and Nina, were my main motivation to complete the manuscript, and this book is dedicated to them.

Contents

1

Introduction

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Part I Supplements of Action 2

Supplement

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3

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard

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Ophelias Zimmer, Alice Birch and Katie Mitchell

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Fortinbras Gets Drunk, Janusz Głowacki

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Part II Différance: Machines and Mixed Realities 6

Différance

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The Hamletmachine, Heiner Müller

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Hamlet’s Lunacy, CREW

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Part III Traces of Hamlet 9

Trace

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Kitsch Hamlet, Saverio La Ruina

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Factory, Igor Bauersima

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CONTENTS

Conclusion

Index

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About the Author

Aneta Mancewicz is a Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research focuses on staging Shakespeare, digital technologies, and European theatre. She is the author of Intermedial Shakespeares on European Stages (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and Biedny Hamlet [Poor Hamlet] (2010). She also co-edited two collections of essays: Intermedial Performance and Politics in the Public Sphere and Local and Global Myths in Shakespearean Performance, both published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018. As an associate dramaturg, she supported adaptations of Shakespeare with virtual and augmented reality‚ such as CREW’s Hamlet (2017 and 2018) and Nexus Studios’ The Tempest (2020).

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Shortly before he dies, Hamlet realises that his story is ambiguous. Still, he urges Horatio to narrate it to others: O God, Horatio, what a wounded name, Things standing thus unknown, shall I leave behind me! If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart Absent thee from felicity awhile And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain To tell my story. (Shakespeare 2007: 5.2.328–333)

Hamlet’s plea points to inconsistences and absences that haunt his deeds. According to Brian Walsh, the prince is well aware that his life is ‘an incoherent narrative that will speak only too clearly of the bizarre and unstable course of his troubled recent past’ (2001: 28). A similar sense of incoherence emerges from Fortinbras’s farewell speech to Hamlet. As a successor to the Danish throne, Fortinbras orders a ceremonious funeral that reaffirms the greatness of the Danish prince, yet in an awkward temporal structure, he denies fulfilment to Hamlet as a political agent and ontological subject (Walsh 2001: 28): ‘For he was likely, had he been put on, / To have proved most royal’ (2007: 5.2.381–382). Fortinbras’s conditional mode, just like Hamlet’s reference to the gaps in his past, signals the incompleteness of Shakespeare’s play. This incompleteness has encouraged manifold analyses and adaptations, starting with Horatio’s account of the plot in the closing scene © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Mancewicz, Hamlet after Deconstruction, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96806-9_1

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(2007: 5.2.363–370). Today Hamlet is one of the most staged, filmed, and discussed of Shakespeare’s plays. Mark Thornton Burnett argues that it is ‘the world’s most frequently filmed text’ (2019: 1). Peter W. Marx, in turn, describes it as ‘undoubtedly one of the great iconic texts of Western literature and theatre tradition’ (2014: ix),1 showing in his impressive companion to Hamlet the play’s unique influence on the development of global theatre and culture. There are at least two possible explanations of such exceptionally rich reception. One is that Hamlet ’s consistent probing into action and morality inspires always-new readings that aim to answer the play’s problems. Another is that incoherencies in Hamlet invite the opposite—an interrogative approach that encourages new questions to emerge with every new version. Seen in this light, the tragedy resonates with the sense of uncertainty that underlies human experience. Indeed, in post-war Europe, after the horrors of World War II and the disillusionment with the new political reality, this condition of uncertainty became the defining feature of many dramatic adaptations of Hamlet. In Central and Eastern Europe, the end of the war did not bring much-desired freedom and self-rule but rather a long period of political oppression and economic instability under the grip of the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, in the West, citizens became disillusioned with a slow progress of civil rights and the rapid rise of neoliberalism, which has resulted in inequality, division, and social unrest. In response to the growing disappointment with European politics and in the spirit of a newly emerging postmodern culture, several playwrights adopted a subversive approach to Hamlet. Jacques Derrida’s theories of deconstruction, in particular, have left a strong imprint on European dramatists and directors working from the 1960s onwards. In this book, I argue that ambiguities and ambivalences that are inherent in Hamlet have been foregrounded by post-war European playwrights and directors. This has led to a new deconstructive paradigm of adaptation, which has been prominent in European drama and theatre since the 1960s. The paradigm focuses on ironies and incoherencies in the source play in the spirit of Derrida’s philosophy. Even though deconstruction as a philosophical and literary method has been extensively examined over the past decades, its full implications for adaptation theory and European Shakespeare reception have not been comprehensively explored. In 1 Where an English version was not available at the time of completing this book, I provide my own translation.

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the area of adaptation theory, deconstruction offers an alternative to accounts that discuss fidelity of new versions or describe them as acts of expanding and explaining the source text. By framing the process of adaptation as an attempt at unsettling and questioning the source, deconstruction proposes a model that patently refuses such efforts. In the area of European Shakespeare reception, deconstruction challenges the long dominance of Hamlet ’s Romantic interpretations and enriches our understanding of the play’s European significance. As a several-decade-long phenomenon that encompasses trends from the Theatre of the Absurd to postdramatic theatre, a deconstructive model of adaptation testifies to the continuity of the European Shakespearean tradition and vital connections between European cultures. In the context of political and economic crises that have shaken Europe and the European Union in the twentyfirst century, this book’s comparative and transnational perspective offers a much-needed reminder of Europe’s shared cultural heritage. A deconstructive framework is applied here to a range of postwar Hamlet adaptations that represent different media—dramatic texts, live theatre productions, and a mixed reality performance—to demonstrate how this framework might be pertinent across various formats. Combining a close study of texts with a detailed examination of stage practice, the book puts a spotlight on dramatic adaptation at a time when the role of the text in theatre is being questioned under the growing influence of physical performance and visual media. In situating non-verbal and even anti-dramatic forms of practice as the driving force of theatrical experimentation, postdramatic theories of theatre and performance have tended to marginalise the role of drama in the theatrical avant-garde. Meanwhile, a turn towards performance in Shakespeare Studies and the rise of what Douglas Lanier defines as ‘post-textual’ Shakespeare on screen (2010: 106) have downplayed the radical potential of dramatic adaptations. Finally, as Graham Saunders notes, few books in the field of Shakespeare scholarship have examined dramatic revisions of Shakespeare, with the majority of the studies looking at other media, such as novels and films (2017: 14). Indeed, although Andy Lavender (2001) and Christel Stalpaert (2010) offer insightful perspectives on postmodern approaches to Shakespeare, they focus on live stage events rather than dramatic texts, whereas Linda Hutcheon (1988), Patricia Waugh (1984, 1992), and Brian McHale (1987) formulate a theory of postmodernism with reference to fiction, introducing critical terminology that only partly resonates with strategies exhibited by post-war playwrights and theatre

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makers. In this book, I foreground the specificity and the importance of drama as part and parcel of broader transformations within European theatre and culture, while looking towards the future of mixed reality performance. The Introduction has two principal aims: first, it identifies key concepts and contexts that define the relationship between deconstruction and adaptations of Shakespeare, and second, it articulates the methodology and structure of the book.

Deconstruction A deconstructive approach to Hamlet adaptations responds to the unique construction of Shakespeare’s play and the tradition of its criticism. Several interpretations have emphasised absences and ambiguities in the tragedy. Derrida himself claims that Hamlet exemplifies the logic of haunting and spectrality, which he sees as ‘inseparable from the very motif […] of deconstruction’ (2006: 225). Normand Berlin underlines the hesitant, secretive, and unresolved nature of the play (1981: 43), whereas Lavender perceives it as representative of postmodernism, in its ‘refusal of closure, a taste for mindgames, a liking for play, and a penchant for metaphor rather than literalism’ (2001: 22). The focus on spectrality and uncertainty in these commentaries points to ruptures in Hamlet ’s language, characterisation, and action. It is these very ruptures that deconstructive adaptations foreground when approaching the source material. Deconstruction with its emphasis on undermining the canon is also particularly applicable to Shakespeare’s play because of its high status in Western drama and theatre. Staging Shakespeare continues to be associated with prestige, and in many European cultures, it is a crucial step in establishing a director’s career and a company’s style. While the Derridean deconstruction seems particularly adequate for the analysis of Hamlet and its adaptations, it is not applied here as a revelation of the play’s ultimate meaning. Equally, I do not use Hamlet as an arbitrary example of deconstructive criticism—particularly since Shakespeare’s oeuvre has been notoriously employed to verify the validity of deconstruction. As Brian Vickers ironically observes, ‘The assumption seems to be: “these famous contemporary critics say that language and reference undermine themselves and all works of literature: let us see how we can apply their ideas to Shakespeare”’ (1993: 182). Vickers’s remark is very much to the point, since several scholars have declared their intention to

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use Shakespeare’s work merely to explore the critical potential of deconstruction (Felperin 1991: 69; McDonald 1978: 36; Patterson 1991: 47). Such instrumental mode of assimilating Shakespeare into deconstruction is part of a broader process of transforming this philosophical approach into a method of literary criticism. Deconstruction, initially conceptualised by Derrida in the 1960s, was a set of philosophical ideas, rather than a model of literary analysis (Vickers 1993: 165, 167). According to Vincent Leitch, it aimed at questioning the very foundations of Western culture, such as the ‘received ideas of the sign and language, the text, the context, the author, the reader, the role of history, the work of interpretation, and the forms of critical writing’ (1982: ix). It was Derrida’s followers from Yale University, J. Hillis Miller and Paul de Mann, who subsequently adapted the philosophical theory into a practical method of critical investigation (Fischer 1985: xi–xiii). This book appropriates deconstruction further to support examination of dramatic and theatrical adaptations. Deconstruction entered Shakespeare studies slowly and shyly. Initially, there were only sporadic articles devoted to deconstructing the playwright’s work, for instance, David J. McDonald’s ‘“Hamlet” and the Mimesis of Absence: A Post-Structuralist Analysis’ (1978), while critics expressed their reservations about applying deconstructive approaches to the analysis of Shakespeare as a classical author. Writing about Hamlet in 1983, James Calderwood insisted that deconstructive tendencies are part of metadramatic considerations in that they constitute only an element of the tragedy, which eventually moves ‘from deconstruction to reconstruction’ (1983: xv). These cautious remarks exemplify the initial resistance of early modern scholars to use deconstruction as a method that openly undermines the coherence and unity of Shakespeare’s plays. In consequence, deconstruction did not make a serious impact on Shakespeare studies until the 1980s (Grady 1991: 190; Vickers 1993: 180), which saw the publication of such influential collections as Alternative Shakespeares, edited by John Drakakis (1985), and Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, edited by Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (1985), followed in 1988 by Shakespeare and Deconstruction, edited by Douglas G. Atkins and David M. Bergeron, with the second edition published in 1991. Since then, the process of appropriating Shakespeare into the deconstructive paradigm has proceeded more rapidly (Grady 1991: 190), with a number of academic writings as well as scholarly conferences devoted to the topic.

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In the last few decades, several Shakespeare’s plays have been examined from a deconstructive perspective, particularly Hamlet (Calbi 2013; Calderwood 1983; Eagleton 1986; McDonald 1978; Patterson 1991; White 2015: 106–107), Troilus and Cressida (Kopper 1991; Scott 1991; Miller 1977), Othello (Eagleton 1986; Murray 1991), and the Sonnets (Felperin 1991; Flores 1991). One of the most explicit and eloquent applications of deconstruction to Shakespeare in recent years has been Maurizio Calbi’s Spectral Shakespeares, which uses the Derridean notion of the ‘Thing “Shakespeare,”’ an entity that is spectral, elusive, and prone to permutations (2013: 1), to examine the proliferation of Shakespearean adaptations in a range of twenty-first-century media, such as film, television, and the Internet. Calbi skilfully demonstrates how the Derridean concept of spectrality provides a relevant framework for Shakespeare’s presence ‘in the increasingly digitalized and globalized mediascape’ of our times (2013: 2). Despite successful applications in literature and media studies, deconstruction so far has not been specifically and systematically employed as a practical model to examine dramatic and theatrical adaptations of Shakespeare. It is clear, however, that the Derridean paradigm lends itself well to this task, as evidenced by post-structuralist interpretations of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (Buse 2002; Kokot 2003) and Heiner Müller’s The Hamletmachine (Fiorentino 2002; Fischer-Lichte 1991; Steiger 1990; Sugiera 1997; Taubeneck 1991; Teraoka 1985). Most importantly, Lynne Bradley has persuasively argued for deconstructive tendencies in the twentieth-century British revisions of King Lear, in which the dramatists perform ‘the double gesture of modern adaptation’ by simultaneously manifesting reverence and resistance to Shakespeare (2010: 10). While these critical works offer valuable insights into postmodern tendencies in Shakespeare’s rewritings, they do not establish a comprehensive theory of deconstructive adaptation for drama and theatre. Even though deconstruction as a label is frequently used in discussions of twentieth- and twenty-first-century adaptations of Shakespeare, it is often applied rather loosely to mean a broad range of practices that could challenge the canonical text. The aim of this book is to reframe deconstruction as a distinctive paradigm of adaptation, with a strong philosophical underpinning, and to offer it as a method for examining twentieth- and twenty-first-century adaptations in drama and theatre.

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Adaptation Given Shakespeare’s iconic status and Hamlet ’s popularity, approaches to this tragedy trace broader transformations in post-war European drama and theatre. According to Julie Sanders, ‘The history of Shakespearean re-visions provides a cultural barometer for the practice and politics of adaptation and appropriation’ (2006: 51). Deconstructive approaches to Hamlet in post-war Europe are particularly significant in that they make a twofold contribution to our understanding of adaptation as a process that is subject to changing cultural and political conditions. On the one hand, they offer an alternative to the focus on fidelity that continues to inform the reception of Shakespeare; on the other, they challenge the idea of adaptation as an improvement or modernisation of the source. Although scholarship on adaptation has moved beyond the discussions of fidelity (see for instance, McFarlane 1996; Cardwell 2002; Hutcheon 2006; Hutcheon with O’Flynn 2013), hailing a new era of ‘post-fidelity adaptation studies’ (2013: Calbi 7), the concept still shapes audience expectations and artistic choices when it comes to Shakespeare. As Katherine Rowe argues, ‘what audiences measure an adaptation against is really their own preconceptions about “what Shakespeare intended,”’ with the Romantic idealisation of the playwright supporting the notion of his universality (2010: 306). Consequently, many theatre and film directors adapting Shakespeare justify their individual interpretations by claiming to be true to the playwright’s intention or the conditions of staging in his time. Even those adaptations that are marketed as radical and innovative are often thinly disguised attempts at fidelity to Shakespeare and his times. A striking example of this is the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Tempest directed in 2016 by Gregory Doran. Announced as a ground-breaking experiment with live motion-capture on stage, the production applies highly sophisticated and costly technology to recreate an effect of the Renaissance court masque. Such reverence to Shakespeare and his stagecraft in adaptation practice is of course part of a larger cultural narrative. What initially grew out of the Romantic fascination with Shakespeare as an individual genius and a more restrictive understanding of authorship rights has now been transformed into the Shakespeare brand, fiercely promoted by major cultural institutions and state-funded companies. Shakespeare’s cultural status remains so powerful that revolutionary versions of his plays might

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be still condemned by more conservative spectators and critics as deviations from the original. Stanley Wells notes that ‘[i]t is natural for us to feel that departure from Shakespeare’s text represents derogation, while restoration is a step forward’ (2003: 328). Thus while translations and modernisations that make the play more accessible tend to be praised, truly radical revisions might be criticised as attacks on the classic. Defining such radical adaptations as ‘reenactments,’ that is ‘revised, revisited, reconceived, reconstituted’ versions of Shakespeare’s plays (2019: 11), Tom Cartelli notes how they are likely to be rejected by audiences and reviewers, who are not ready to appreciate bold experimentation (2019: 13). A deconstructive model of adaptation offers artists an alternative to the narratives shaped by fidelity or infidelity to Shakespeare’s intention. Deconstruction fundamentally challenges the privileged position of the author as the ultimate arbiter of the text’s meaning. From a deconstructive perspective and in the spirit of postmodern playfulness, contradictions in the source are not to be categorised as formal flaws resulting from the author’s negligence. In the case of Hamlet, for instance, they are not to be blamed on Shakespeare’s inability to rework his sources and find an ‘objective correlative’ for Hamlet’s emotion (Eliot 1941: 145). Equally, they are not to be discredited as lamentable consequences of omission, misspelling, or misinterpretation on the part of editors. Instead, incongruities in the tragedy are seen as representative of the inherent nature of language, which inevitably produces incoherent, paradoxical texts. Undermining the authority of the author and the coherence of the text, deconstruction emphasises a non-hierarchical, self-reflexive relationship between the tragedy and its versions. Since the text is not guarded by the author’s or the editor’s intention, it readily lends itself to adaptations and other forms of intertextuality. Given that from the perspective of différance writing involves an ever-expanding chain of signs, adaptation is a natural complement to the source rather than its derivative offshoot. The source text, in turn, is perceived as fragmented, marked by voids and traces of absent meanings, and as such it invites an act of supplementation. Gary Waller sees the idea of the text’s unity as a key target of deconstructive criticism: Perhaps no single idea has had such a stubborn hold over the critical fashions of our century as that of textual unity or wholeness, and it is precisely this assumption of organicism that deconstruction has most successfully

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attacked, arguing that texts are always riddled by abysses, closed only by repression; their apparently solid ground no rock but thin air. (1991: 32)

Although deconstruction has been explored in theatre scholarship for decades, the consequences of this ‘attack’ on the text’s unity have not been fully grasped in adaptation theory, particularly in revisions of Shakespeare. Perhaps the most important consequence of deconstruction for our understanding of adaptation is the idea that the purpose of a new version is not to improve on the text, but to interrogate its gaps and ambiguities. While it is no longer common in adaptation studies to claim that new versions are inherently imitative and inferior to their sources, there is now an opposite tendency to see adaptations as some sort of expansion or enrichment of the source. In the Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, Timothy Corrigan observes how ‘different nuances, revisions, revaluations, and rewritings could suggest adaptation as an improvement of its source in a variety of ways’ (2017: 27). The idea resonates with an understanding of adaptation in biology and ecology. Drawing on Charles Darwin’s observations about birds at the Galapagos islands and on other instances of genetic modification to fit a specific environment, Sanders shows how adaptation ‘proves in these examples to be a far from neutral, indeed highly active, mode of being, far removed from the unimaginative act of imitation, copying, or repetition that it is sometimes presented as being by literature and film critics obsessed with claims to “originality”’ (2006: 24). Adaptation emerges in this context as an act of adjustment or advancement that makes it possible for a source to survive in changing conditions. This description provides a fitting model for how new versions of Shakespeare’s works tend to be portrayed in scholarly and popular discourses that seek to counterbalance the fidelity framework—adaptations in these accounts are described as vital and perhaps even necessary alterations which ensure that a rare and precious source text can remain current and contemporary across different times, places, audiences, and media. Although scholars and critics are unlikely to suggest that adapters necessarily improve the works of Shakespeare, there is still a tendency to see adaptation as a means of making the source ‘texts “relevant” or easily comprehensible to new audiences and readerships via the processes of proximation and updating’ (Sanders 2006: 19). Adaptations are thus expected to modernise and clarify historically and culturally distant sources. This suggests a powerful even if often

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unarticulated idea that the process of adaptation consists in smoothing over the edges of distant time and custom to make the source more accessible to contemporary audiences. Drawing on the philosophy of deconstruction, this book proposes an alternative model of adaptation. Unlike the accounts of adjustment or updating, a deconstructive model focuses on interrogating and questioning the source to produce works that ostensibly fail to offer clear and definitive points of reference for the audience. I will refer to such works as rewritings, versions, and revisions, avoiding terms that imply a value judgement, whether negative, such as abridgement and distortion, or positive, such as amelioration and amplification. Instead of assessing deconstructive adaptations in terms of their efforts to elucidate the source, I propose to study them as distinct modes of textual and theatrical revision and as part of a long and rich practice of Hamlet ’s European reception.

Deconstructive Adaptation The concept of deconstructive adaptation refers here to a cluster of strategies that enable subversion of the source and deferral of its explication, together with textual openness, multilayered signification, and unrestrained productivity. A deconstructive adaptation assumes that source texts are inherently incongruous, polysemantic, and paradoxical rather than unified, coherent, and complete. Consequently, the focus is on contradictory, negative, and absent elements in the source as well as the co-existence of several possible meanings rather than a single, consistent interpretation. This approach is reflected in the development of the action, the characters, and the fictional world. A deconstructive adaptation involves extensive reorganisation of the source by means of omissions, reductions, reshuffling of scenes, juxtaposition of high register with low, contemporary language with archaic diction, or tragedy with burlesque. The development of action might be illogical and incomprehensible, based on meaningless and trivial incidents rather than grand endeavours. Marginal characters from the source tend to be given the primary attention in the process of adaptation, while the principal protagonists might disappear from the script. The characters often function as symbolic figures rather than fully developed individuals, whereas their behaviour may lack psychological motivation or logical explanation. Consequently, authors and artists deconstructing

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literary texts produce works marked by confusion, mystery, menace, and anxiety, as well as parody, paradox, irony, and metatheatre. Some techniques applied in deconstructive adaptations are evocative of the strategies used in drolls, short entertainments introduced after the Puritan government prohibited staging plays in 1642, and in nineteenthcentury burlesques of Shakespeare’s plays. These techniques include misunderstanding and irony, parody of lofty language and grand action, as well as elements of metatheatre. Indeed, W. S. Gilbert’s burlesque Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, first published in 1874, might have foreshadowed Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (Nadel 2002: 163; Scott 1989: 5), which is examined here as an example of a deconstructive adaptation. Ultimately, however, there is a crucial difference between post-war adaptations and earlier, comic versions of Shakespeare’s plays. Historically, drolls and burlesques overturned and underplayed tragic components of their source dramas to offer popular entertainment. This claim might be illustrated by citing Francis Kirkman’s description of drolls in his two-part collection The Wits, or Sport upon Sport, which he published after the Puritan ban on theatres was officially reversed. In Part I, he presents drolls as ‘fitted for the pleasure and content of all persons, either in court, city, countrey, or camp’ (1662). In Part II, he claims that the compiled drolls and farces ‘were presented and shewn for the merriment and delight of wise men, and the ignorant’ (1673). By contrast, deconstructive adaptations emphasise fissures and inconsistencies within the source text to reveal negative and contradictory aspects of human communication and interaction. This results in the phenomenon that Hutcheon describes with reference to postmodern fiction as ‘seriously ironic parody’ (1988: 124). Unlike authors of earlier drolls and burlesques, post-war dramatists and directors tend to invert the very purpose of burlesque (which in itself is a reversion of high genres), by means of underscoring dark and disturbing elements within the comic design. Thus, while travesties of Hamlet functioned before as popular entertainments, ensuring the currency of Shakespeare’s tragedy among a broad range of audiences (described by Kirkman as ‘wise men, and the ignorant’), post-war deconstructive adaptations are often highly demanding and can be seen as elitist. This is particularly evident when we include among them works such as Müller’s The Hamletmachine or CREW’s Hamlet’s Lunacy. The main purpose of these deconstructive adaptations has been not to entertain the audience but to offer a

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complex critique of Shakespeare’s tragedy within richly layered historical and contemporary contexts. The demanding character of deconstructive adaptations results from their reliance on a range of strategies that might be identified with the Derridean supplement, différance, and trace. The three terms problematise the issues of authorship, textuality, and presence. They undermine the idea of the text as an author-controlled, referential, and logical entity (Fischer 1985: 33–34), assuming that its closure would entail reduction of its meaning (Norris 2002: 32). Encouraging textual openness and the free play of signifiers, supplement, différance, and trace have themselves an ambiguous ontological status, suspended between presence and absence. According to Derrida, supplement encompasses both addition and replacement (1976: 144–145), différance is ‘neither a word nor a concept’ (1982: 3) and ‘has neither existence nor essence’ (1982: 6), whereas ‘the trace itself does not exist’ (1976: 167), but is only ‘the simulacrum of a presence’ (1982: 24). Supplement, différance, and trace have a unique ontological status in Derrida’s deconstructive philosophy because they challenge traditional Western assumptions associated with writing, language, and meaning. As G. Douglas Atkins observes, ‘In deconstruction, “something” always prevents the collapse of differences into identities, as well as the possibility of “rigid differentiation”; that “something” may be called, if not the supplément, the “trace,” or différance’ (1991: 14). The critic suggests that the three terms perform a similar function—they maintain differences without imposing the ultimate closure of meaning. Derrida emphasises a close connection between these concepts, examining their application in language: Now if we consider the chain in which différance lends itself to a certain number of nonsynonymous substitutions, according to the necessity of the context, why have recourse to the ‘reserve,’ to ‘archi-writing,’ to the ‘architrace,’ to ‘spacing,’ that is, to the ‘supplement,’ or to the pharmakon, and soon to the hymen, to the margin-mark-mark-march, etc. (1982: 12)

Derrida’s compilation of terms that undermine fixed identity and closure arises from his desire to challenge Western logocentrism and demonstrate the paradoxical nature of language. By introducing concepts that are similar yet describe writing in a slightly different manner, Derrida illustrates ‘the systematic play of differences, of the traces of differences, of

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the spacing by means of which elements are related to each other’ (1981: 27). Nevertheless, since each term emphasises a unique aspect of adaptation, each will be matched with a distinctive group of examples to explore how deconstruction can be applied to dramatic and theatrical versions of Hamlet in different European contexts.

European Reception of Hamlet If we recognise adaptation as ‘a cultural process,’ following Cartelli and Rowe, then we also need to accept their view that it reflects a particular ‘cultural imaginary’ that is the ‘prevailing set of fantasies, values, desires, and assumptions’ that define a given culture at a particular point in time (2007: 25–44). Shifts in the European reception of Hamlet testify to the transitory and fluid nature of the ‘cultural imaginary,’ showing how attitudes to the play have been invariably marked by the spirit of their times. Already in the Restoration period, playwrights declared the need to adapt Hamlet for their tastes. William Davenant proclaimed that he would ‘reform and make [the works of Shakespeare] fit for the company of actors appointed under his direction and command’ (qtd. in Wells 2003: 186), even though his version of Hamlet from 1661 reveals only stylistic alterations, with the omission of 850 lines (Wells 2003: 188). In the same year, John Evelyn observed about Hamlet that ‘[t]he old play began to disgust this refined age’ (qtd. in Wells 2003: 186), and similarly in 1679 John Dryden criticised Shakespeare’s language as full of phrases that are incomprehensible, vulgar, and pretentious, claiming that ‘his whole style is so pestered with figurative expressions that it is as affected as it is obscure’ (qtd. in Wells 2003: 186). When Dryden and his contemporaries listed flaws of Hamlet in commentaries and adaptations of the tragedy, they considered its form to be obsolete or even offensive, not adequately refined for their aesthetic judgement. Similarly to Restoration writers, subsequent critics assessed Hamlet on the basis of their implicit or explicit aesthetic and ethical standards. In some cases, artistic as well as religious principles informed the critics’ dissatisfaction with the play’s nihilism. T. S. Eliot’s famous disapproval of Shakespeare’s tragedy in ‘Hamlet and His Problems’ (1941) is a manifestation of his own theory of literary composition, but it might also reflect his Anglo-Catholic beliefs. Declaring the tragedy to be ‘an artistic failure,’ Eliot notes with a slight hint of admiration that the play is ‘puzzling, and disquieting as is none of the others,’ yet he ultimately denounces it for

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containing ‘superfluous and inconsistent scenes which even hasty revision should have noticed’ (1941: 143). Although the poet articulates his fascination with mystery and malaise in the play, he cannot help but perceive ‘superfluous and inconsistent scenes’ as a mark of the play’s imperfection, implying that literary works should be, at least to some extent, concise and coherent. Similarly, G. Wilson Knight’s preference for Claudius over Hamlet reveals the critic’s predilection for movement, presence, and positive values, but it may equally be a reflection of his ardent spiritualism. Knight observes that ‘[i]nstead of being dynamic, the force of Hamlet is, paradoxically, static,’ and he condemns this force, whose ‘poison is the poison of negation, nothingness, threatening the world of positive assertion’ (1970: 41). Consequently, Knight presents Claudius as the favourite hero in the play, whereas Hamlet is reproached for his inclination towards irony, cynicism, nihilism, and death. Deconstructive adaptations of Hamlet are also revealing about cultural assumptions of twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists. These manifest most clearly in the consistent questioning of universality, completeness, and excellence that Romantic critics bestowed on this tragedy. From the Romantic perspective, any incoherencies, omissions, or flaws in the text were either blamed on editors, or excused on the grounds of artistic licence, leading to a paradoxical situation in which Hamlet began to function as ‘an untidy, inconsistent and badly constructed masterpiece’ (Kott 1994: 57). Deconstructive approaches, by contrast, make it possible to see inconsistencies in the tragedy as natural components of linguistic articulation, while adaptations of the play focus precisely on exposing aporias and incoherencies in the text and its critical tradition. Moreover, deconstruction undermines the long-standing notion of organic unity (Miller 1979: 252), which the Romantic interpreters introduced to the criticism of Shakespeare’s oeuvre, for instance, Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his reflections on the synthetic nature of poetry and drama in Biographia Literaria (1983: 19–28). A deconstructive model also discards the idea of authentic and original Shakespeare, which Richard Burt calls ‘the invention of eighteenth-century editors’ (2002: 13). Instead, it brings into focus unexpected and disruptive elements in Shakespeare’s works. Finally, deconstructive dramatists and directors contest the Romantic identification with dramatic protagonists, since the character’s identity and action are no longer perceived as logically organised and stable. Given the centrality of the eponymous protagonist in Hamlet, the move away from Romantic readings to deconstructive ones has brought

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a crucial change in the reception of Shakespeare’s tragedy. This change requires a closer analysis, since it has led to the subversion of Hamlet’s subjectivity and agency in selected adaptations and the shift from psychological to postmodern interpretations of Shakespeare’s prince. As noted by Harold Bloom, ‘Hamlet is Shakespeare’s longest play, and the prince’s role (at about fifteen hundred lines) is similarly unique’ (2004: 6). A singular and mostly subjective focus on Hamlet has been evident since Romanticism in the writings of such famous commentators as William Hazlitt, Coleridge, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Gottfried von Herder, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel, Sigmund Freud, Ernest Jones, Eliot, A. C. Bradley, and Bloom. Although Margreta de Grazia in Hamlet without Hamlet (2007) convincingly challenges the tradition of subjective, character-focused interpretations to foreground such themes as heritage and genealogy, the Shakespearean prince continues to haunt the imagination of European dramatists and directors. In deconstructive adaptations, Hamlet is not a psychological subject but a semantic figure, charged with complex and often contradictory meanings. Artists working in this mode consciously distance themselves from an earlier practice of treating the protagonist as a living person who stands at the centre of the play. However, they continue to rely on the tension between Romantic-like images of Hamlet as a charismatic, noble hero and deconstructive images of him as an imperfect, impotent prince, who both experiences and provokes anxiety over his lack of agency. When dramatists and directors as diverse in their aims and techniques as Müller and Saverio La Ruina restore Hamlet to the family milieu, as if in accordance with de Grazia’s reading of the tragedy, they suppress Romantic interpretations of the character, and those discarded readings remain as a trace, a negative intertext in their plays. Given the hero’s privileged position in Shakespeare’s tragedy and the long tradition of psychological readings, post-war dramatists and directors inevitably enter into a dialogue with Hamlet as an individualised and highly idealised character. In his play, Shakespeare gave dramatic shape to a predominantly introspective subject, reconciling the demands of action with the spirit of self-reflection. While Hamlet obsessively probes into himself, his minute self-examination can be as passionate and moving as his most heroic deeds. Knight perceives scenes from Hamlet ‘as expressions of that unique mental or spiritual experience of the hero which is at the heart of the play’ (1970: 17). Similarly, Linda Bamber notes that the world of the play mirrors the inner feelings of the protagonist (1982: 82).

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Indeed, in a subjective exploration of characters and events, Hamlet treats the world as a reflection of his own emotions, which influences interpretation of the whole play. In Charles Marowitz’s witty formulation, ‘Hamlet takes place in Hamlet’ (1968: 45). Consequently, the protagonist not only determines our interpretation of the events in Elsinore but also substitutes the enactment of revenge with the process of investigation, where the chief object of inquiry is not the murderer, but his own self. The appeal of Hamlet, however, cannot be easily explained as an effect of his eloquence or his dominant function in the play. After all, he challenges the genre of revenge tragedy: for five acts he postpones the murder of Claudius, and when he finally kills the king, it happens almost accidentally, in an unpremeditated act rather than according to an intricately sketched plan. What is it then in Hamlet that continues to fascinate us? And how is this character appropriated? The popularity and the persistence of Hamlet-focused interpretations owes to the protagonist’s emergence as an influential figure in the Romantic and psychoanalytic criticism. Although some of the early critics hinted at the notion of character in Shakespeare’s works, such as Margaret Cavendish in a letter from 1664, which according to Wells constitutes the first prose piece of Shakespearean criticism (2003: 206), it was not until the late eighteenth century that Shakespeare’s characterisation would be closely examined and widely acclaimed. Serious critical interest in Hamlet originated in Romanticism. In his highly influential Shakespearean Tragedy, first published in 1904, A. C. Bradley gives a striking account of this shift: Hamlet seems from the first to have been a favorite play; but until late in the eighteenth century, I believe, scarcely a critic showed that he perceived anything specially interesting in the character. […] How significant is the fact (if it be the fact) that it was only when the slowly rising sun of Romance began to flush the sky, that the wonder, beauty and pathos of this most marvelous of Shakespeare’s creations began to be visible. (1986: 80–81)

Evoking pre-Romantic attitudes to Hamlet, Bradley suggests interpretations that might correspond to de Grazia’s model of the tragedy. Most importantly, he perceives the Romantic turn to the protagonist as an almost divine revelation, which dispersed the darkness of earlier criticism and brought into light the true value of the tragedy, its ‘wonder,

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beauty and pathos.’ Viewed from a contemporary perspective, the critic’s solar imagery, which is strikingly Romantic in its form and affirmative of Romanticism in its content, obscures the merit of initial commentaries on Hamlet, imposing a Romantic paradigm on the early twentieth-century readers of the tragedy. Bradley’s tribute to the Romantic interpretation of Hamlet as a character-based play arises from his own critical inclination to read Shakespeare’s tragedy in a psychological manner (Feibleman 1946: 138), yet it also reflects dominant cultural tendencies at the beginning of the twentieth century. Indeed, with the expansion of Romantic attitudes, subjective and psychological interpretations of Hamlet became prevalent, owing to the continued appeal of influential English and German critics, such as Coleridge, Hazlitt, Goethe, Herder, and Schlegel (Feibleman 1946: 134–137). Interpreting the dramatic character as a reflection of their own sensibility, Romantic critics and poets described Hamlet as a fragile, inwardly focused young man. Eliot notes that writers like Goethe and Coleridge tended to ‘find in Hamlet a vicarious existence for their own artistic realization,’ which led them to create their own version of the protagonist as a substitute for Shakespeare’s (1941: 141). As they pursued their artistic and personal goals, Romantic critics ‘through some weakness in creative power’ (Eliot 1941: 141) or, as Hamlet might say, ‘for some vicious mole of nature in them’ (2007: 1.4.24), practised literary criticism as a form of artistic creativity. Consequently, they abstracted the protagonist from the play, attributing to him excessive sensitivity and inwardness. Perceived in this manner, Hamlet began to function as a lyrical outburst rather than a dramatic scenario. This confirms Kott’s claim that Shakespeare’s tragedy lends itself not only to multiple interpretations, but also to different genre applications (1994: 53). The focus of Romantic and post-Romantic commentators on poetry in the play echoed wider transformations in Romantic poetics, which advocated the synthesis of genres, but ultimately gave preference to lyrical forms. It was thus in accordance with Romantic inclinations that Bloom argues about Hamlet that ‘[o]f all poems, it is the most unlimited’ (2004: 3). Bloom’s approach to Hamlet as a psychological subject and to the tragedy as ‘the center of a secular scripture’ (2004: 3) demonstrates that the impact of the Romantics on the play has been long-lasting and far-reaching. Romantic poets introduced the interpretation of Hamlet as a tragedy of a young hero who challenges social structures, political constraints, and religious beliefs, gaining moral victory despite his tragic death. R.

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A. Foakes observes that the protagonist’s ‘weakness in failing to carry out what he resolves to do was noted by Schlegel, and became for Coleridge the centre of Hamlet’s character’ (1993: 14). This ‘weakness,’ however, did not discredit him in the eyes of his Romantic admirers, who, according to Paul Cantor, were not capable of recognising Shakespeare’s irony towards the protagonist (2004: 79). Romantic readers of the tragedy tended to idealise Hamlet and treat him as a character independent from the text. In the words of Foakes, ‘Abstracted from the play, Hamlet became a free-floating signifier, taking on the subjectivity of the critic, and typically reflecting his anxieties’ (1993: 15). This resulted in the development of ‘Hamletism’ as a mode of thinking and acting that was marked by a bleak awareness of life’s complexity and that led to melancholy and indecision. The concept emerged as an English term by the 1840s and was soon introduced into other languages (Foakes 1993: 20–21). In a Polish play by Roman Jaworski, Hamlet wtóry [Hamlet Secondary], from circa 1924, the term functions as a well-established concept, readily defined by the characters (1995). The Romantic focus on Hamlet’s subjectivity was further reinforced by the development of modern psychoanalysis (Feibleman 1946: 138). Freud, Jones, and their followers from the psychoanalytic school of literary criticism approached Shakespeare’s hero not as a fictional figure, but as a disturbed patient whose behaviour might be traced back to his unconscious and diagnosed according to current theories in psychopathology. Freud famously refers to Shakespeare’s tragedy as a modern representation of the male child’s desire for intercourse with his mother, complemented by the wish for his father’s death. He argues that by articulating the protagonist’s inhibitions and repressed instincts, Hamlet unveils sexual obsessions that, in Oedipus Rex, are represented in the form of dreams. At the same time, Freud establishes a direct link between the Romantic and psychoanalytic reading of Hamlet. In the discussion of the hero’s procrastination, he evokes Goethe’s notion of Hamlet as an over-reflective individual, alongside a psychoanalytic theory that diagnoses the hero as ‘a pathologically irresolute character which might be classed as neurasthenic’ (1971: 265). Similarly, Jones insists that ‘no dramatic criticism of the personae in a play is possible except under the pretence that they are living people’ (1949: 18). The statement constitutes an extreme reformulation of the Romantic fascination with character. It led Jones to argue that Hamlet’s suppressed sexuality

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governs the development of dramatic action and explains inconsistencies in the play, particularly the question of the hero’s delayed revenge, which he called ‘the Sphinx of modern Literature’ (1949: 22). The echoes of Romantically inclined, psychopathological interpretations of Hamlet have continued to reverberate in criticism (McCanles 1991: 193) and in theatre, including such celebrated performances as those of Lars Eidinger at Berlin’s Schaubühne in 2008, and Michael Sheen at London’s Young Vic in 2011. The cracks on the Romantic self-identification with Hamlet, however, began to appear already in the modernist era. Eliot saw Hamlet’s part as too dominant and heroic to render the experience of a modern subject, instead putting forward the excessively self-conscious, insecure, and clumsy J. Alfred Prufrock (1952). From a postmodern perspective, the act of identification with Hamlet has become even more problematic—the hero no longer represents a well-defined set of values, which can be easily imitated. Instead, he appears as a contradictory, incoherent figure, whose identity is more likely to be denied, as when Müller’s protagonist declares in the opening line of The Hamletmachine: ‘I was Hamlet’ (2001: 1), only to reaffirm his non-identity with the statement ‘I am not Hamlet’ (2001: 5). In the course of the twentieth century, approaches to Hamlet became not only more radical but also more focused on the performative potential of the tragedy. According to Kott, in the nineteenth century, most critics tended to explore ‘the problem who Hamlet really was,’ whereas a century later they began to investigate the play in a theatrical context (1994: 57–58). This produced novel ways of reading Hamlet, with deconstructive adaptations playing a crucial role in this shift. The Romantic view has remained a point of reference for European dramatists and directors, while they have ultimately revealed the irony in treating the hero as a living person and instead examined his status as a complex and contradictory theatrical figure. A deconstructive approach to the Shakespearean hero is also symptomatic of wider transformations in drama and theatre, which broke with the psychological unity of stage characters under the influence of postmodern philosophy. In her seminal The Death of the Character (1996), greatly indebted to Derridean deconstruction, Elinor Fuchs notes that post-structuralist theory influenced the ‘crisis of representation’ within several fields of human knowledge, accompanied by the dissolution of traditional boundaries between disciplines, as well as between high and

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low culture (1996: 2). As she situates these phenomena in the context of American theatre, Fuchs implies that the breakdown of former distinctions and unities became particularly visible in performances of classical plays. Providing an example of a postmodern production, she makes a significant choice—she imagines a version of Hamlet set ‘in many periods simultaneously, each character carrying his own theatrical world on his back’ (1996: 2). Finally, postmodern changes in the representation of Hamlet reflect the experience of history in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. In his 1993 monograph, Foakes argues that an anti-heroic perspective on Shakespeare’s prince might revise our understanding of the play’s problem as ‘questioning the nature, usefulness, and indeed the possibility of action in a world we cannot comprehend – our democratic world, in which the structures of power have become ever more remote, inscrutable and unaccountable to ordinary people’ (1993: 41). Foakes’s remark suggests that Hamlet might resonate not only with the purely philosophical interrogation of purpose and meaning but also with a political crisis of democratic institutions that have become increasingly disconnected from the public. Such an approach strongly informs the practice of deconstruction in the selected works, which with a varying degree of directness question the ways in which power is attained, administered, distributed, and maintained. Deconstruction as a subversive method of adaptation effectively brings out the postmodern distrust of hierarchies, canonical readings, and established structures. Its commitment to disrupting the existing order distinguishes this paradigm from other approaches to Shakespeare’s plays and justifies the methodology of contextual analysis adopted in this book.

Methodology and Structure Dramatic and theatrical adaptations of Hamlet analysed in the book span the period from the 1960s to the 2010s and originate from six European countries: Belgium, Germany, Italy, Poland, Switzerland, and the UK. They vary in terms of their popularity—while some have enjoyed international recognition, others have functioned more locally. I have selected the following works: Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966), Heiner Müller’s Die Hamletmaschine [The Hamletmachine] (1977), Janusz Głowacki’s Fortynbras si˛e upił [Fortinbras Gets Drunk] (1990), Igor Bauersima’s Factory. Nach einer Geschichte von Réjane Desvignes und Igor Bauersima [Factory. Based on a Story by

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Réjane Desvignes and Igor Bauersima] (2002), Saverio La Ruina’s Kitsch Hamlet (2004), Alice Birch and Katie Mitchell ‘s Ophelias Zimmer [Ophelia’s Room] (2015), and CREW’s Hamlet’s Lunacy (2019).2 The prevalence of male and white figures in this selection owes to their dominant position in post-war European theatre, where historically women and ethnically diverse artists have had fewer opportunities to develop their careers. Hopefully, with the growth of inclusive practices and the rising social awareness in the twenty-first century, there will be greater equality in the sector and more equitable representation. At the same time, the book examines only European works, as it aims to articulate a unique relationship between deconstruction and adaptation in post-war European cultures, where dramatists and directors have shared and contested the legacy of Romantic and psychoanalytical interpretations of Hamlet. In discussing the chosen works, I draw on scripts and—whenever available—play recordings and personal experiences of attending live performances. Additionally, I have been involved in earlier iterations of CREW’s Hamlet’s Lunacy as an associate dramaturg and researcher, which has given me an insider’s perspective into the process of its development. The selection is thus necessarily subjective and, given issues with access to historical productions, it privileges plays over performances. However, I also argue that the choice of works is representative of deconstructive adaptations in post-war Europe, as I have sought to showcase a range of dramaturgical approaches, cultural perspectives, and theatrical traditions. In terms of the selected artists and their links with deconstruction, although the dramatists and the directors examined here might not explicitly refer to Derrida’s philosophy, there is a striking affinity between their approach to Hamlet and the deconstructive paradigm. This affinity does not completely explain the chosen works, which are strongly shaped by their distinctive aesthetic styles and cultural conditions. However, deconstruction offers a workable theoretical framework for examining their take on Hamlet, while it also enables historical and transnational comparisons. With the time frame of the selected works encompassing several decades and countries, it is possible to observe the evolution of playwriting and staging practices from the 1960s onwards in Europe. Some aspects of 2 To assist the Anglophone readers, the play titles are used in English, apart from Ophelias Zimmer, which was staged in the UK under its German title.

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this evolution are not confined just to Europe, but have an international reach. For example, throughout this period and across the globe, we can witness how electronic and digital technologies have become increasingly developed and dominant in stage design, from the use of television sets to virtual reality environments. In several selected works, these technologies make a significant contribution to the process of Hamlet ’s deconstruction in that they enable intricate juxtapositions and layerings of realities, temporal perspectives, and identities. Meanwhile, other aspects of the chosen adaptations, such as their close relationship with the Romantic tradition or their reflection on distinctive divisions in Europe (West versus East and North versus South) are more region-specific. Historical and geographical contextualisation is thus crucial for identifying the core elements and specificities of Hamlet ’s deconstruction in Europe. Deconstructive works examined here have revised the European reception of Hamlet, and in some cases, they have revolutionised the ways of writing, staging, and spectating plays in the post-war period. A transnational perspective is invaluable in that it reveals continuities, contrasts, changes, and departures. A study of Hamlet adaptations across multiple European traditions makes it possible to see broader patterns and peculiarities in European culture, particularly when we situate the works in their social and cultural milieus through references to history, politics, literature, and art. Although the chosen adaptations originate in the same source, they are shaped by distinctive artistic aspirations, social observations, and theatrical traditions of their authors. Conceived in four different languages—English, German, Polish, and Italian—the works stem from a range of cultural contexts in Europe. Consequently, they reflect changing approaches to history and tradition, the uses and abuses of power, the fear and fascination with madness, and the perceptions of masculinity and femininity. Given the importance of cultural influences for the choice of adaptations, I adopt a contextual analysis approach to reveal those aspects of the plays and performances that a purely formalist use of deconstruction would most likely neglect. A contextual analysis attends to the factors that contribute to the production of works as well as conditions of their interpretation. This approach situates Shakespeare’s historical Hamlet as one of many sources in the process of adaptation, acknowledging the role of intertextual references, political events, and social issues as vital resources for dramatists and directors. Such contextual framework is indeed fundamental to understanding drama and theatre, which depend on the sharing

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of cultural codes between artists and audiences. Adaptations are even more explicitly reliant on this cultural sharing, as audience members are expected to recognise remnants of the source (or multiple sources) in a new work. Indeed, as the selected case studies deconstruct Hamlet’s story, they also depend on the willingness of the readers and spectators to identify Hamlet and acknowledge its status as an exceptional drama, ‘a macrosign loaded with meanings and references attached to it, not only by Shakespeare but also by generations of interpretators and commentators’ (Kowzan 1989: 90). Mindful of this extraordinary legacy, the selected artists enter into dialogue not only with Hamlet but also with subsequent versions of the play in a range of historical and cultural contexts. While contextual and intertextual elements underlie analysis of all chosen examples, in terms of the book’s structure, each part focuses on a specific strategy identified with the concepts of supplement, différance, and trace. Part I deals with works in which Shakespeare’s hero appears in the background, as a minor character, with his story supplemented by the dominant perspective of other protagonists. This strategy is discussed in Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Birch and Mitchell’s Ophelias Zimmer, and Głowacki’s Fortinbras Gets Drunk. Part II focuses on Hamlet as a collection of literary allusions, historical and political references, as well as dramatic conventions—a chain of signs in the form of différance. Hamlet in this context appears as a semiotic figure with a multi-textual and multilayered identity. This is shown through an investigation of Müller’s The Hamletmachine and CREW’s Hamlet’s Lunacy. Part III examines works that exclude Hamlet from the plot only to retain him as a visible absence, a trace of himself, with La Ruina’s Kitsch Hamlet and Bauersima’s Factory as examples. The selected adaptations challenge the key components of Hamlet, such as coherent action, Hamlet’s agency, as well as heroic and supernatural elements in the play. At the same time, in focusing on this particular text, post-war dramatists and directors inevitably reaffirm its cultural importance. Despite examples of disintegration or even disappearance of Hamlet from post-war versions, the Danish prince continues to function as a well-recognisable cultural icon and an inexhaustible source of inspiration. As evidenced by the chosen plays and performances, whether he is onstage or offstage, talkative or silent, based in a historical or contemporary context, Hamlet is still here. He is always waiting for someone ‘to tell his story.’

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Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism. History, Theory, Fiction. New York and London: Routledge. Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. New York and London: Routledge. Hutcheon, Linda, with Siobhan O’Flynn. 2013. A Theory of Adaptation. New York and London: Routledge. Jaworski, Roman. 1995. ‘Hamlet wtóry. Zaginiony dramat Romana Jaworskiego.’ In Archiwum Literackie 28, 236–360. Warszawa: Instytut Badan´ Literackich. Jones, Ernest. 1949. Hamlet and Oedipus. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd. Kirkman, Francis. 1662. The Wits, or Sport upon Sport. Selected pieces of drollery, digested into scenes by way of dialogue… Part I. London. Kirkman, Francis. 1673. The Wits, or Sport Upon Sport: Being a Curious collection of Several Drols and Farces Presented and Shewn for the Merriment and Delight of Wise Men, and the Ignorant… Part II. London. Knight, G. Wilson. 1970. The Wheel of Fire. Interpretations of Shakespearean Tragedy. London: Methuen. Kokot, Joanna. 2003. ‘All the World’s a Stage’; Theatre-within-Theatre Convention in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.’ In Conventions and Texts, edited by Andrzej Zgorzelski, 113–139. Gdansk: ´ Uniwersytet Gdanski. ´ Kopper, John. M. 1991. ‘Troilus at Pluto’s Gates: Subjectivity and the Duplicity of Discourse in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida.’ In Shakespeare and Deconstruction, edited by G. Douglas Atkins and David M. Bergeron, 149–171. New York: Peter Lang. Kott, Jan. 1994. Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Translated by Bolesław Taborski. London: Routledge. Kowzan, Tadeusz. 1989. ‘Hamlet ’s Theme as a Macrosign.’ Assaph. Studies in the Theatre. Section C, 5: 83–90. Lanier, Douglas. 2010. Recent Shakespeare Adaptation and the Mutations of Cultural Capital. Shakespeare Studies 38: 104–113. Lavender, Andy. 2001. Hamlet in Pieces. Shakespeare Reworked by Peter Brook, Robert Lepage, Robert Wilson. London: Nick Hern Books. Leitch, Vincent. 1982. Deconstructive Criticism. An Advanced Introduction. New York: Columbia University Press. Marowitz, Charles. 1968. ‘Introduction.’ In The Marowitz Hamlet. A Collage Version of Shakespeare’s play, by Charles Marowitz, 11–50. London: Allen Lane. Marx, Peter W., ed. 2014. Hamlet Handbuch: Stoffe, Aneignungen, Deutungen. Stuttgart and Weimar: Verlag J.B. Metzler. McCanles, Michael. 1991. ‘Shakespeare, Intertextuality, and the Decentered Self.’ In Shakespeare and Deconstruction, edited by G. Douglas Atkins and David M. Bergeron, 193–211. New York: Peter Lang.

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McDonald, David J. 1978. ‘“Hamlet” and the Mimesis of Absence: A PostStructuralist Analysis.’ Educational Theatre Journal 30, no. 1 (March): 36–53. McFarlane, Brian. 1996. Novel to Film. An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. McHale, Brian. 1987. Postmodernist Fiction. London and New York: Routledge. Miller, J. Hillis. 1977. ‘Ariachne’s Broken Woof.’ Georgia Review 31, no. 1 (Spring): 44–60. Miller, J. Hillis. 1979. ‘The Critic as Host’. In Deconstruction and Criticism, edited by Harold Bloom et al., 217–253. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Müller, Heiner. 2001. The Hamletmachine. Translated by Dennis Redmond. http://www.efn.org/~dredmond/Hamletmachine.PDF. Accessed 27 May 2019. Murray, Timothy. 1991. ‘Othello, an Index and Obscure Prologue to the History of Foul Generic Thoughts.’ In Shakespeare and Deconstruction, edited by G. Douglas Atkins and David M. Bergeron, 213–243. New York: Peter Lang. Nadel, Ira. 2002. Double Act. A Life of Tom Stoppard. London: Methuen. Norris, Christopher. 2002. Deconstruction. Theory and Practice. London: Routledge. Parker, Patricia, and Geoffrey Hartman, eds. 1985. Shakespeare and the Question of Theory. New York: Methuen. Patterson, Annabel. 1991. ‘The Very Age and Body of the Time.’ In Shakespeare and Deconstruction, edited by G. Douglas Atkins and David M. Bergeron, 47–68. New York: Peter Lang. Rowe, Katherine. 2010. ‘Shakespeare and Media History’. In New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, edited by Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells, 303–324. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sanders, Julie. 2006. Adaptation and Appropriation. Oxon and New York: Routledge. Saunders, Graham. 2017. Elizabethan and Jacobean Reappropriations in Contemporary British Drama: ‘Upstart Crows.’ London: Palgrave Macmillan. Scott, Michael. 1989. Shakespeare and the Modern Dramatist. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Scott, William O. 1991. ‘Self-Difference in Troilus and Cressida.’ In Shakespeare and Deconstruction, edited by G. Douglas Atkins and David M. Bergeron, 129–148. New York: Peter Lang. Shakespeare, William. 2007. Hamlet. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. The Arden Shakespeare. Third Series. London: Thomson Learning. Stalpaert, Christel. 2010. ‘Something Is Rotten on the Stage of Flanders: Postdramatic Shakespeare in Contemporary Flemish Theatre.’ Contemporary Theatre Review 20 (4): 437–448.

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Steiger, Klaus Peter. 1990. Moderne Shakespeare-Bearbeitungen. Ein Rezeptionstypus in der Gegenwartsliteratur. Stuttgart, Berlin, Köln: Verlag W. Kohlhammer. Sugiera, Małgorzata. 1997. Wariacje szekspirowskie w powojennym dramacie europejskim. Kraków: Universitas. Taubeneck, Steven. 1991. ‘Deconstructing the GDR: Heiner Mueller and Postmodern Cultural Politics.’ Pacific Coast Philology 26, no. 1–2 (July): 85–95. Teraoka, Arlene Akiko. 1985. The Silence of Entropy or Universal Discourse. The Postmodernist Poetics of Heiner Müller. New York: Peter Lang Publishing. Vickers, Brian. 1993. Appropriating Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Quarrels. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Waller, Gary. 1991. ‘Decentering the Bard: The Dissemination of the Shakespearean Text.’ In Shakespeare and Deconstruction, edited by G. Douglas Atkins and David M. Bergeron, 21–45. New York: Peter Lang. Walsh, Brian. 2001. ‘The Rest Is Violence: Müller Contra Shakespeare.’ PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 23, no. 3 (September): 24–35. Waugh, Patricia. 1984. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. London and New York: Methuen. Waugh, Patricia. 1992. Practising Postmodernism, Reading Modernism. London and New York: Edward Arnold. Wells, Stanley. 2003. Shakespeare for All Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press. White, R.S. 2015. Avant-Garde Hamlet: Text, Stage, Screen. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

PART I

Supplements of Action

CHAPTER 2

Supplement

Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy explores an existential dilemma, but it also stems from a practical and pressing problem regarding the execution of revenge: Thus conscience does make cowards – And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pitch and moment With this regard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action. (Shakespeare 2007: 3.1.82–87)

The problem of revenge underlies the structure of Hamlet’s argument. Dismayed by the situation at the court, the protagonist poses a number of questions, and they, in turn, have direct influence on his behaviour: What happens after death? How shall our deeds be evaluated? Is there punishment for crimes committed during one’s lifetime? Uncertain about the answers, Hamlet cannot decide which course of action to take—if any. His most celebrated ‘[t]o be or not to be’ question (Shakespeare 2007: 3.1.55) might be thus reformulated into to act or not to act dilemma. The prince, aware that great deeds inevitably ‘lose the name of action’ when one is confronted with uncertainty, resolves this dilemma through a paradox. Acting out madness, Hamlet grants himself more freedom at the highly controlled court, yet at the same time, he deprives his endeavours of gravity and purpose. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Mancewicz, Hamlet after Deconstruction, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96806-9_2

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In Hamlet as a revenge tragedy, the obligation to act is at the centre of the play. However, when Hamlet postpones the execution of the filial duty to avenge the murder of the father, the word takes precedence over action and when something finally happens, it seems almost accidental. The hero’s delayed revenge has been frequently investigated by scholars and critics, as well as dramatists and directors. They have sought to explain the behaviour of the protagonist by exploring different motives, such as Hamlet’s brooding nature, Claudius’s powerful position in Elsinore, or Shakespeare’s experimentation with the conventions of revenge tragedy. In this part, I argue that in deconstructive adaptations, action is suspended and scrutinised as a dramaturgical and a philosophical problem. Through the Derridean concept of supplement, I analyse action in three deconstructive versions of Hamlet: Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Alice Birch and Katie Mitchell’s Ophelias Zimmer, and Janusz Głowacki’s Fortinbras Gets Drunk. The analyses show how supplement undermines the possibility and purpose of action, and as such it introduces a negative interpretation of Hamlet as a play in which the characters are unable to change their fate; they remain trapped in oppressive systems of power and control. Each selected adaptation introduces a unique approach to the problem of action and the world of the characters. Stoppard exhibits in his drama the nihilistic features of the Theatre of the Absurd; Birch and Mitchell draw on the traditions of feminist performance, whereas Głowacki relies on the conventions of a political thriller and a political theatre in Poland. The variety of approaches illustrates the philosophical and political potential of the Derridean supplement for Hamlet adaptations.

Supplement Jacques Derrida introduces supplement to challenge the privileged position of speech in Jean Jacques Rousseau’s philosophy and in Western tradition more broadly. Describing writing as supplementary to speech, he notes that the supplement complements and enriches that to which it is added: The supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude, the fullest measure of presence. It cumulates and accumulates presence. It is thus that art, technè, image, representation, convention,

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etc., come as supplements to nature and rich with this entire cumulating function. (Derrida 1976: 144)

However, according to Derrida, supplement is also inherently paradoxical—an addition implies the existence of a previous void that needs to be filled: But the supplement supplements. It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of ; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void. If it represents and makes an image, it is by the anterior default of a presence. […] As substitute, it is not simply added to the positivity of a presence, it produces no relief, its place is assigned in the structure by the mark of an emptiness. (Derrida 1976: 145)

If completeness excludes the possibility of addition, then when a new element is introduced to enhance a particular entity, it means that this entity was not truly complete in the first place, but rather defined by ‘a void,’ ‘the anterior default of a presence,’ or ‘an emptiness.’ The act of supplementation, therefore, does not necessarily reinforce the presence of a thing, but reveals what has been absent from it. Supplement can be applied to literary theory in several ways, as J. Hillis Miller suggests in his seminal essay ‘The Critic as a Host’ (1979). According to Michael Fischer’s useful summary, Miller relies on supplementation to examine literary genres, the relationship between texts and their predecessors, the repetition of elements within works of the same author, the relationship between different interpretations of a text, the relationship between criticism and literature, as well as the relationship between literature and life (Fischer 1985: 54). These varied applications of supplementation can be further connected into a sequence of relationships, which Derrida has suggested with the possibility of ‘the chain of supplements’—such chain promises access to an object but also defers it, which supports Derrida’s paradoxical and contradictory theory of language (1976: 157). The French philosopher claims that ‘[e]ssentially and lawfully, every concept is inscribed in a chain or in a system within which it refers to the other, to other concepts, by means of the systematic play of differences’ (Derrida 1982: 11). The chain of supplements is, thus, inscribed in the process of writing itself, and as such it can describe the relationship between literature and criticism and the relationship between

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source texts and their versions. Although readers tend to experience literature without the help of critics as intermediaries, the very production of criticism perceived as supplementation of interpretations suggests that literary works require further commentary or elucidation. If something might be still added to the interpretative repertoire of a text, then the text is in a way marked by a void. This negative aspect of supplementation is particularly visible in the deconstructive method of criticism, which approaches all texts with distrust, challenging their completeness and stability. As Derrida argues, meaning is the product of textuality rather than the author; therefore, the task of the reader is not to decipher the author’s intention but to detect contradictory messages and missing elements, known as ‘blind spots’ in the text. Derrida claims that ‘the writer writes in a language and in a logic whose proper system, laws and life his discourse by definition cannot dominate absolutely’ (1976: 158) and that ‘in each case, the person writing is inscribed in a determined textual system’ (1976: 160). Consequently, he suggests that the reader should focus not on the author, but on the text, or rather on those moments in the text that reveal inconsistencies and paradoxes of writing. In Derrida’s deconstruction of Rousseau’s text, the paradoxical nature of supplement is perceived as an example of such a blind spot, where the meaning escapes the author’s intention: The way in which he [Rousseau] determines the concept and, in so doing, lets himself be determined by that very thing that he excludes from it, the direction in which he bends it, here as addition, there as substitute, now as the positivity and exteriority of evil, now as a happy auxiliary, all this conveys neither a passivity nor an activity, neither an unconsciousness nor a lucidity on the part of the author. Reading should not only abandon these categories – which are also, let us recall in passing, the founding categories of metaphysics – but should produce the law of this relationship to the concept of the supplements. It is certainly a production, because I do not simply duplicate what Rousseau thought of this relationship. The concept of the supplement is a sort of blind spot in Rousseau’s text, the not-seen that opens and limits visibility. (Derrida 1976: 163)

The contradictory nature of supplement (‘here as addition, there as substitute, now as the positivity and exteriority of evil, now as a happy auxiliary’) is central to the deconstruction of Rousseau’s text. Crucially,

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supplement is identified here not only as an example, but also as a very instrument of deconstruction. Several scholarly interpretations of Hamlet can be categorised as Derridean supplements, given that their authors have attempted to reveal ‘blind spots’ or ‘fill a void’ in the text as well as in the criticism of the play. Writing in this manner, they have focused on fundamental problems of the tragedy, such as the motivation of the eponymous hero (for instance, Calderwood 1983; McDonald 1978; Waller 1991), but also on other, minor issues, which reveal inconsistencies in the play, such as the presentation of Horatio (Newell 1988). Simultaneously, they challenged the claims of other commentators of Hamlet. Indeed, with the appearance of supplementary interpretations, we learn about new aspects of the play, but we are also told that our previous critical assumptions were incomplete or imperfect. At the same time, new interpretations of Hamlet are not necessarily more comprehensive, and they are certainly not final. Instead, they situate Shakespeare’s tragedy in a new historical and cultural context, underscoring some meanings while downplaying others. Moreover, the production of criticism does not proceed in a linear way, as it has been demonstrated by Margreta de Grazia, who has challenged the two-hundred-year tradition of interpreting Hamlet as an inwardly focused subject: It was not sharper vision that brought Hamlet’s complex interiority into focus. Rather, it was a blind spot. In order for Hamlet to appear modern, the premise of the play had to drop out of sight. The premise is this: at his father’s death, just at the point when an only son in a patrilineal system stands to inherit, Hamlet is dispossessed – and, as far as the court is concerned, legitimately. (2007: 1)

The reference to ‘a blind spot’ evokes Derrida’s observations about supplement in Rousseau. Moreover, although de Grazia’s work makes extensive use of historical material, she does not aim to reconstruct Shakespeare’s purpose or the experience of early modern viewers of the tragedy. This might not be a conscious borrowing, but her terminology, her dismissal of the authorial intention, and her disregard for an objective historical reconstruction exhibit the subversive spirit of deconstructive criticism. More generally, her approach implies that investigations of Hamlet do not proceed in a linear manner, as new generations of critics tend to go back and revise earlier assumptions. With the supplementation

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of always-new interpretations, the tradition of Hamlet ’s criticism never really makes a full circle, but rather follows a spiral, seemingly going backwards but ultimately arriving at a new place. Similarly, dramatists and directors supplementing Shakespeare’s story are always part of a greater chain of supplements. Turning to Hamlet, they have to acknowledge other versions of the play. As Jan Kott observes, alluding to T. S. Eliot’s comparison between Hamlet and Mona Lisa, ‘[i]t is not just Mona Lisa that is smiling at us now, but all those who have tried to analyze, or imitate, that smile’ (1994: 47). In practical terms, supplementation may be achieved by means of expanding the source plot with new events or by presenting the action from a novel perspective. It might also consist in marginalising the main protagonists and elevating less prominent figures to principal roles. In these cases, producing links which were originally vague or absent aims to expose inconsistencies and gaps in the plot. This in turn might completely revise the source’s interpretation, particularly when adaptations focus on characters whose role in the source text is subsidiary and who were traditionally schematised or silenced. Because of their easily recognisable plots and popularity with the audience, Shakespeare’s plays are particularly wellsuited for this kind of rewriting, which extends the pleasure of the source text while exploring its complexity. Tim Crouch’s series of one-person shows, which puts a spotlight on secondary dramatic figures, such as Malvolio, Banquo, Caliban, Cinna, and even Peaseblossom (2011, 2012), offers one of the most striking examples of shifting the character focus in recent Shakespeare adaptations. Crouch invites audience members to recollect the source plot while confronting them with some of its darkest and most troublesome issues. However, among Shakespeare’s dramas, it is Hamlet that has been perhaps most often adapted through drawing on minor protagonists, with post-war European plays offering a wealth of ˙ examples. For instance, Fortinbras is the principal hero in Jerzy Zurek’s Po Hamlecie [After Hamlet] (1981) and Głowacki’s Fortinbras Gets Drunk; Ophelia occupies central role in Birch and Mitchell’s Ophelias Zimmer, Saverio La Ruina’s Kitsch Hamlet , and Eduardo Quiles’s Una Ofelia sin Hamlet [An Ophelia Without Hamlet] (1993), while Gertrude is the leading character in Howard Barker’s Gertrude: The Cry (2002). In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, the primary importance is given to two characters whose position in Shakespeare’s tragedy is not only marginal but also purely instrumental—first, they are employed by

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Claudius to spy on Hamlet; then they are exploited by Hamlet to outwit Claudius. A growing interest in protagonists such as Fortinbras, Ophelia, Gertrude, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern reflects wider political and cultural transformations. In post-war Central and Eastern Europe, under the dominance of the Soviet Union, Fortinbras as a self-imposed ruler from a neighbouring country became crucial to understanding power struggles in Hamlet, whereas Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as court spies were immediately recognised as familiar figures by audiences living under surveillance. Meanwhile, the rise of feminism has led to the reevaluation of Ophelia and Gertrude as victims of patriarchal society. An increasing focus on marginal characters in Hamlet has also resulted from the expansion of postmodernism as a cultural paradigm that, according to Hugh Grady, challenges the hierarchical division into centre and periphery, defies established political ideologies, and gives voice to previously under-represented social groups (1991: 209). The following examination of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Ophelias Zimmer, and Fortinbras Gets Drunk as deconstructive adaptations focuses on supplementation as a means of questioning rather than completing Shakespeare’s plot. Although Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Ophelia, and Fortinbras are placed at the centre of the selected works, their behaviour does not resolve the gaps and ambiguities in Hamlet. On the contrary, in all three versions, we observe further disintegration of the world of the play, with the characters finding themselves caught in the cycle of violence, futility, and despair. Portraying protagonists as lacking in freedom and heroism and yet desperately trying to assert their agency, Stoppard, Birch, Mitchell, and Głowacki make use of the paradoxical nature of supplement. At the same time, their strategies differ in terms of form and focus, revealing distinctive cultural contexts from which these works have originated. Even if Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead does not expand Shakespeare’s plot by introducing important new episodes, it offers a striking example of the Derridean supplement. Stoppard extensively develops the roles of Ros, Guil, and the Player. Attributing to the two courtiers a primary position in the drama, he shifts Shakespeare’s foreground to the background, which influences the interpretation of his play, as well as our understanding of Hamlet. The shift is not merely parasitic and playful, since it reveals incongruities in Hamlet. Writing in the tradition of Theatre of the Absurd, Stoppard undermines the very purpose and

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coherence of action. His adaptation is influenced by the European drama and theatre of the 1960s, in particular Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1965) and Peter Hall’s 1965 Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Hamlet, in which David Warner portrayed the title protagonist as a disillusioned young student (Scott 1989: 25). In his supplement, Stoppard deconstructs the conventions of tragedy and the tragic hero to question the dignity of human life, as well as the validity of individual memory. From this perspective, the author is not simply ‘a parasite feeding off Shakespeare, Pirandello and Beckett,’ as described by Michael Scott (1989: 14), or an imitator who ‘avoids any re-interpretation of Hamlet,’ as argued by Joanna Kokot (2003: 114). Instead, Stoppard critically and consciously plays with Hamlet to produce what Sonya Freeman Loftis describes as ‘a self-reflexive adaptation that mocks both its own derivative status and its Shakespearean source’ (2013: 97). He also interrogates crucial aspects of Shakespeare’s tragedy to unsettle the Romantic, psychological tradition of its interpretation. Reading Stoppard’s drama as a supplement shows how a deconstructive adaptation refuses to clarify the source and instead reveals its blind spots. Such interpretation is implied in Irving Wardle’s description of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead as ‘probably the first play in theatrical history with a pair of attendant lords in the lead. Stoppard does nothing to fill out their blank outlines. Their blankness is the whole point’ (qtd. in Gordon 1994: 15). Wardle’s remark could be read as an apt summary of the Derridean supplement. It shows how Stoppard accumulates intertextual references to deliberately expose textual and existential voids. From this perspective, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead might be seen as a commentary not only on Shakespeare’s tragedy but also on human life. Indeed, as Ruby Cohn argues about this play, Stoppard’s ‘philosophic statements are not parody and his death drive is not mere farce’ (1976: 217). Her insistence on serious undertones in the comic design offers an insight into the paradoxical nature of deconstructive adaptation that often aims to be funny and playful while asking uncomfortable questions about its source. Similarly, at the heart of Ophelias Zimmer lies a profound contradiction. Birch and Mitchell claim to follow a feminist agenda in that they present events from Shakespeare’s tragedy entirely from Ophelia’s perspective. This results in shifting the focus from Hamlet’s soliloquies to the heroine’s silence. However, although Ophelia occupies the centre of the plot, she does not cease to be a victim. On the contrary, as the

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adaptation underlines the mundane and repetitive nature of her life, it also emphasises the abusive and threatening behaviour of her father and the court more broadly. In Birch and Mitchell’s version, Ophelia does not really acquire her own voice and agency, but instead she becomes even more visibly deprived of opportunities to speak and act on her own behalf. As in the other two examples examined in this part, the use of supplement in Ophelias Zimmer consists in elevating the protagonist from a marginal position to the main role, yet the ultimate aim of this is not to empower the heroine, but rather to reveal her powerlessness when she is confronted with much stronger and more dangerous forces. This leads to a pessimistic interpretation of Hamlet as a disturbingly dark tragedy, in which individuals are trapped in scenarios beyond their control. It also suggests a deeply depressing vision of reality, with patriarchal power structures firmly fixed and resistant to change. Finally, in Fortinbras Gets Drunk supplement points to serious and sincere messages behind the effects of irony and parody. The play focuses on power struggles, exaggerating their brutality and absurdity to show the futility of resistance. Głowacki shifts perspectives more radically than Stoppard and Birch, since in his version the events in Denmark are filtered through the Norwegian affairs; he also rearranges Hamlet ’s plot more extensively than the other two playwrights. The Polish adaptation considerably develops the role of Fortinbras while introducing several other characters whose stories run parallel to the course of Shakespeare’s action. Written in 1990, Głowacki’s adaptation is indebted to the Polish tradition of reading Hamlet as an inherently political play. According to Bogusław Sułkowski, this tradition was particularly widespread in the 1980s, in the period between the introduction of martial law in Poland in 1981 and the collapse of communism in 1989 (1998: 172–176). Wanda ´ atkowska in her fascinating study of Hamlet ’s presence in Polish Swi˛ post-war culture notes that several Polish directors in the 1980s, such as Ryszard Smozewski, ˙ Janusz Warminski, ´ and Józef Jasielski were criticised precisely for exploiting the play to comment on the current political ´ atkowska further observes that in Polish adaptasituation (2019: 101). Swi˛ tions of Shakespeare’s tragedy produced between 1953 and 1989, it was Fortinbras rather than Hamlet who became the most prominent figure inviting observations on mechanisms of power, invasion, and internal discord (2019: 189). Similarly to other plays and performances from this period, Fortinbras Gets Drunk focuses on the Norwegian prince to expose

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the threat of foreign interference, but also the danger of internal state control and surveillance. At the same time, the adaptation parodies the conventions of a political thriller, a quintessentially Cold War genre, and the more established techniques of political pastiche.

Conclusion Describing the selected works as supplements means foregrounding their critical and interrogative attitude to Hamlet. Adaptations in this part are not merely adding new material or reshuffling a few familiar scenes, even if Stoppard ironically implies this interpretation, having Guil accuse Ros of ‘just repeat[ing] it in a different order’ (1967: 81). From the perspective of deconstruction, characters like Ros, Guil, Ophelia, and Fortinbras aim to reveal blind spots in Hamlet, and they succeed in doing so because of their marginalised position. Their debates and doubts, articulated from the sidelines of Shakespeare’s tragedy, reveal a series of dramaturgical and philosophical problems in Hamlet, putting the very concept of action in question. At the same time, each of the selected works uncovers disturbing and even menacing undertones in the development of Shakespeare’s events. Although elements of parody and pastiche might contribute to the comic character of dramatic supplements, their overall messages are serious and sincere. The three adaptations in Part One exemplify paradoxical nature of the Derridean supplement. They simultaneously add and replace; they also confront the source action, exposing problems in its construction and content. Stoppard, Birch, Mitchell, and Głowacki, offer new perspectives on Hamlet, which allows them to develop the motivation of the characters, even if they do not offer a consistent rationale for their actions. The selected adaptations strengthen some themes from the tragedy, while exposing restrictions imposed by Shakespeare’s text and its tradition of interpretation. More specifically, they subvert genre conventions and moral values inscribed in the Renaissance tragedy and its Romantic readings, as they question heroic and patriarchal patterns of behaviour. As supplements, the selected adaptations add multiple points of view from which Hamlet ’s plot might be experienced; these points of view offer diverse and often contradictory approaches to the dramatic events. Stoppard significantly develops the perspective of Ros and Guil, but he also introduces the standpoint of the Players, who enact and discuss Shakespeare’s action. Birch and Mitchell scrutinise patriarchal structures

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of the source by following Hamlet ’s action through Ophelia’s eyes and her mother’s voice. Finally, Głowacki presents events in Elsinore from the point of view of the Norwegian observers—unscrupulous politicians Sternborg and Eight Eyes, ignorant Fortinbras, corrupted Polonius, and unsympathetic guards. As this brief overview of selected works shows, each of them is informed by its distinctive cultural and political context. Together they reveal how supplement can open up rich possibilities for the process of adaptation in a way that is deeply sensitive to different audiences. Introducing additional perspectives means enhancing the role of the audience, which is already crucial in Shakespeare’s play. Marie Lovrod points out that Hamlet features the notion of watching not only as spying, and that it also includes the perspective of God who is either present or assumed to be present (1994: 499). In the three selected works, however, there is no hint of a divine perspective, which significantly influences their structure and the behaviour of the protagonists. Lovrod claims that the exclusion of God’s view from a play encourages the development of metadrama, which ‘addresses the human anxiety about authority that arises when any universal perspective is irrevocably eradicated’ (1994: 498). She argues that since the Renaissance the role of an omniscient audience has significantly diminished, resulting in the rise of metadramatic strategies (1994: 499). Similarly, Richard Hornby maintains that the growing importance of metadrama since the Renaissance owes to the intellectual eradication of God and gods (1986: 17). In the works examined in this part, the lack of religious assurance, combined with a pessimistic world view, has forced the characters to reflect on the nature of their reality, which in turn has resulted in references to theatrical illusion. In a metadramatic and metatheatrical framework, the spectators are expected to give validity to the characters and actions on stage. When in Stoppard’s adaptation Shakespeare’s text replaces God, Ros and Guil are left in confusion as how to act (Lovrod 1994: 505)—they are just like the Players, who desperately need an audience to provide them with identity and purpose (Fleming 2001: 58). Similarly, in Birch and Mitchell’s version, the audience gives significance to Ophelia’s mundane and repetitive actions by activating the context of a broader patriarchal system. Analogously, the characters in Głowacki’s play cannot rely on divine intervention or poetic justice, as they are victims of their own accidental and

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arbitrary deeds. In the end, it is the spectators who are left to make sense of the plot by drawing on their knowledge of Shakespeare’s scenario. Parallel to introducing new perspectives and strengthening the role of the audience, the selected works demonstrate the impossibility of change within their dramatic worlds. Despite the modern language and context, the characters in the examined examples act according to Shakespeare’s script, conforming to its rigid rules. As versions of Hamlet, these works are, thus, inherently paradoxical—additional elements fill in the gaps within the tragedy, seemingly to shed more light on the action, yet they ultimately undermine the coherence of the events on stage. The adaptations in this part revise the source plot and, at the same time, deny the possibility of substantial transformation to the characters, who are caught in the cruel mechanism of eternal repetition. At their core, all the three versions depend on a paradox, which defines their approach to the source and which is crucial to their interpretation. The paradox is inherent to the nature of supplement—the selected works appear to complement Hamlet, yet a closer analysis reveals that their main aim is to question their source.

References Barker, Howard. 2002. Gertrude (The Cry): And Knowledge and a Girl (The SnowWhite Case). London: Calder Publications. Beckett, Samuel. 1965. Waiting for Godot. A Tragicomedy in Two Acts. London: Faber and Faber. Calderwood, James. 1983. To Be and Not to Be: Negation and Metadrama in Hamlet. New York: Columbia University Press. Cohn, Ruby. 1976. Modern Shakespeare Offshoots. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Crouch, Tim. 2011. I, Shakespeare: Four of Shakespeare’s Better-Known Plays ReTold for Young Audiences for Their Lesser-Known Characters: I, Malvolio/I, Banquo/I, Caliban/I, Peaseblossom. London: Oberon Books. Crouch, Tim. 2012. I, Cinna (The Poet). London: Oberon Books. Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1982. ‘Différance.’ In Margins of Philosophy, edited by Jacques Derrida. Translated by Alan Bass, 1–27. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fischer, Michael. 1985. Does Deconstruction Make Any Difference? Poststructuralism and the Defense of Poetry in Modern Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Fleming, John. 2001. Stoppard’s Theatre. Finding Order Amid Chaos. Austin: University of Texas Press. Freeman Loftis, Sonya. 2013. Shakespeare’s Surrogates: Rewriting Renaissance Drama. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gordon, Giles. 1994. Tom Stoppard. In Tom Stoppard in Conversation, edited by Paul Delaney, 15–23. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Grady, Hugh. 1991. The Modernist Shakespeare: Critical Texts in a Material World. Oxford: Clarendon Press. de Grazia, Margreta. 2007. Hamlet without Hamlet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hornby, Richard. 1986. Drama, Metadrama and Perception. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Kokot, Joanna. 2003. ‘All the World’s a Stage’; Theatre-within-Theatre Convention in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.’ Conventions and Texts, edited by Andrzej Zgorzelski, 113–139. Gdansk: ´ Uniwersytet Gdanski. ´ Kott, Jan. 1994. Shakespeare our Contemporary. Translated by Bolesław Taborski. London: Routledge. Lovrod, Marie. 1994. ‘The Rise of Metadrama and the Fall of the Omniscient Observer.’ Modern Drama 37, no. 3 (Fall): 497–508. McDonald, David J. 1978. ‘”Hamlet” and the Mimesis of Absence: A PostStructuralist Analysis.’ Educational Theatre Journal 30, no. 1 (March): 36–53. Miller, J. Hillis. 1979. ‘The Critic as Host.’ In Deconstruction and Criticism, edited by Harold Bloom et al., 217–253. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Newell, Alex. 1988. ‘The Etiology of Horatio’s Inconsistencies.’ In ‘Bad’ Shakespeare. Revaluations of the Shakespeare Canon, edited by Maurice Charney, 143–156. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses. Quiles, Eduardo. 1993. ‘Una Ofelia sin Hamlet. Espectáculo teatral para una actriz y una actriz-maniquí.’ Estreno: cuadernos de teatro español contemporáneo, no. 1: 8–12. Scott, Michael. 1989. Shakespeare and the Modern Dramatist. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Shakespeare, William. 2007. Hamlet. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. The Arden Shakespeare. Third Series. London: Thomson Learning. Stoppard, Tom. 1967. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. A Play in Three Acts. New York: Samuel French. Sułkowski, Bogusław. 1998. ‘A Polish Reinterpretation of Hamlet.’ In Hamlet East-West, edited by Marta Gibinska ´ and Jerzy Limon, 171–176. Gdansk: ´ Theatrum Gedanense Foundation. ´ atkowska, Wanda. 2019. Hamlet.pl: My´slenie ‘Hamletem’ w powojennej Swi˛ kulturze polskiej. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellonskiego. ´

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Waller, Gary. 1991. ‘Decentering the Bard: The Dissemination of the Shakespearean Text.’ In Shakespeare and Deconstruction, edited by G. Douglas Atkins and David M. Bergeron, 21–45. New York: Peter Lang. ˙ Zurek, Jerzy. 1981. Po Hamlecie. Dialog 4 (April): 5–32.

CHAPTER 3

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard skilfully exploits the paradoxical nature of supplement. His play famously elevates Ros and Guil from the position of minor characters to the status of main protagonists only to show them vainly striving to make sense of fragmentary and metatheatrical scenes from Hamlet. The playwright recognises in Ros and Guil’s situation an enormous dramatic and comic potential, which allows him to construct humorous scenes by parodying Shakespeare’s characters, language, and plot. In interviews and commentaries on the play, he insists on interpreting and performing his work as a comedy that is distanced from contemporary issues. However, his text (the discussion below is based on Stoppard’s published play from 1967) is clearly infused with ideas and attitudes dominating in the 1960s Europe. This period—marked by Cold War conflicts, social, economic, and political pressures of decolonisation, and the rising civil rights movements—revealed the chaotic and often violent nature of post-war transformations. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (abbreviated in this chapter to R&GAD), with its disjointed action, its parody of individual and collective amnesia, and its emphasis on absurdity as the principal condition of life, rehearses common anxieties of its time. The play’s humour should thus not overshadow its bleak message. Stoppard might have chosen to write a comedy because of his personal skills and preferences (Stoppard qtd. in Mayne 1972: 33–34), but he also © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Mancewicz, Hamlet after Deconstruction, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96806-9_3

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admits that he sees his dramas as more than pure parodies and pastiches: ‘I think that everything I write is supposed to work, at least on one level, in a comic way and, as probably most writers hope, I hope that nothing I write is only funny’ (qtd. in Mayne 1972: 33). In another interview Stoppard described R&GAD as an attempt at creating ‘the perfect marriage between the play of ideas and farce or perhaps even high comedy’ (qtd. in Hudson et al. 1974: 59). Striving for the combination of philosophical ideas with humour, Stoppard might have followed the tradition of Renaissance playwriting. In the greatest plays from Shakespeare’s times, tragic events find their comic counterparts, whereas amusing incidents occur on the brink of catastrophe that is hardly averted by a happy ending. Similarly, in R&GAD the decision to focus on the two courtiers has a comic potential, yet it leads to serious and disturbing observations about the impossibility of progress and the fragility of human life. In this chapter, I argue that the inclusion of contradictory elements is at the heart of Stoppard’s supplement. His application of deconstruction as a dialectical method consists in assembling contrasting ideas to reveal voids within Shakespeare’s script and language. In R&GAD, there are powerful and conflicting forces that define Ros’s and Guil’s actions as well as their fictional world; these forces keep limiting the characters while leaving them without any sense of structure or purpose. The following analysis of the play focuses on the form and function of Stoppard’s deconstructive dialectics and three pairs of contrasts where the application of supplement and dialectical approach is the most noteworthy: action and inaction, memory and amnesia, as well as logic and absurdity. It is through these contrasts that Stoppard portrays the inability of the protagonists to alter their fate, which leads to the disintegration of their world and the conventions of Western drama.

Deconstructive Dialectics Stoppard’s deconstructive dialectics consists in the introduction of opposing images and ideas without ultimately bringing them together. This can be seen already at the level of R&GAD’s dramaturgy: while the play seems to be presenting Hamlet from a new perspective, it shows the source script as a work full of paradoxes and contradictions. Stoppard’s interest in contrasting and contradictory ideas that do not merge into coherent unities but instead continue to co-exist side by side reflects postmodern and post-structuralist distrust of unified and established meanings

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(Heuvel 2001: 217). The instability of the sign as a combination of added meanings and voids was first proclaimed by Roland Barthes in the transition from structuralism to post-structuralism (for instance, in Mythologies 1991), and it was further developed by Jacques Derrida in his writing on différance, trace, and supplement (for instance, in Of Gramatology 1976 and ‘Différance’ 1982). The idea strongly resonates with a dialectical method of bringing together positive and negative elements, which might be traced back to the philosophical system of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, or even earlier to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. As Jill L. Levenson contends, Shakespeare’s tragedy is one of the most eloquent expressions of dialectical thinking in Western writing (2001: 162). Looking at Hamlet as a dialectical play, it is possible to argue that the hero’s procrastination, as well as his melancholy and madness, result from his rebellion against irreconcilable contradictions in human nature, which his father’s abrupt death has exposed like an open wound. Commenting on the development of events after the burial of the king, the protagonist complains that ‘the funeral baked meats/ Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables’ (Shakespeare 2007: 1.2.179–180) and dreads the idea that such a mighty, beloved king could be so soon, so easily forgotten, like ‘[i]mperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay’ (Shakespeare 2007: 5.1.202). From this perspective, ‘[t]o be or not to be’ soliloquy might be read as a proclamation of coexisting contradictions, and this interpretation might be extended to the rest of the tragedy. As James Calderwood claims, ‘Hamlet and the play must both “be” and “not be,” since they are constructed from identities as much as from differences’ (1983: 193). What is crucial from a deconstructive perspective is that these contradictions remain in a productive tension; in Derrida’s words, they need to ‘inhabit philosophical opposition, resisting and disorganizing it, without ever constituting a third term, without ever leaving room for a solution in the form of speculative dialectics’ (Derrida 1981: 43). Occupying the space of resistance within the paradigm of a deconstructive adaptation, Hamlet might be thus seen as transgressing the speculative system of Hegelian dialectics to stimulate an open-ended chain of readings, since ‘the deconstructor … steadfastly disallows any reconstitution, sublimation, or synthesis (any Hegelian Aufhebung ) of opposing terms’ (Leitch qtd. in Smith 1987: 244). Such reading of the tragedy would require interpreting Fortinbras’s arrival in the final scene not as a resolution of conflict but as its continuation, with Denmark’s dependence on its potent neighbour leaving the country vulnerable to future oppression.

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In R&GAD, contradictions and inconsistencies are embedded in the dramatic structure, and they remain unresolved until the end. Throughout the play, the interrogative character of Hamlet’s soliloquy is reflected in recurrent question games of Ros and Guil (Scott 1989: 23) and in dialectical discourse inspired by the works of T.S. Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and Samuel Beckett. Eliot might have provided Stoppard with images of fragmented reality, whereas the latter two playwrights—with paradoxical dialogue. In long poetic pieces, such as The Waste Land (1952) and Four Quartets (1968), contradictory images and ideas break the unity of the poem, yet the poet eventually resolves oppositions into synthesis. Even though in Four Quartets Eliot writes that ‘[w]hat we call the beginning is often the end’ (1968: 5.1), in the closing lines he declares an absolute synthesis: And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well When the tongues of flame are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one. (1968: 5.42–46)

In Eliot’s final image of oneness, things lose their distinctive features and melt into one another, forming ‘the crowned knot of fire.’ Unlike Four Quartets , however, R&GAD does not finish with synthesis. The last words of the play, uttered by Horatio, only emphasise the discrepancy between the bloodiness of Shakespeare’s tragedy and the inaction of Stoppard’s adaptation. Stoppard’s rejection of synthesis which could bring together dispersed experiences, smooth over the differences, and ensure harmony within a literary work is further enhanced by the influence of Wilde and Beckett, who might have both inspired linguistic games in R&GAD, each in a distinctive way. According to Enoch Brater, allusions to Wilde focus on reworking his bon mots, in order to bring out their wit, whereas Stoppard’s indebtedness to Beckett consists in emphasising the repetitiveness of the dialogue exchanged between Ros and Guil (2001: 205). Stoppard has read Beckett as an incredibly funny author, describing Waiting for Godot as a brilliant comedy (Sammells 2001: 107–108). His reliance on Beckett was immediately recognised by theatre reviewers when R&GAD was staged at the National Theatre in 1967 (Fleming 2001: 49). In Beckett’s writing, Stoppard identifies a technique which he calls ‘a Beckett joke,’ observing that ‘[i]t appears in various forms but it consists of confident statement followed by immediate refutation by the same voice’

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(qtd. in Levenson 2001: 160). Stoppard admits to having adopted this method himself: ‘What I’m always trying to say is “Firstly, A. Secondly, minus A”’ (qtd. in Levenson 2001: 160). In another interview, the playwright notes, ‘there is very often no single, clear statement in my plays’ (qtd. in Hudson et al. 1974: 58). ‘A Beckett joke’ might have informed deconstructive dialectics which constitutes the basis of R&GAD. In the play, death walks hand in hand with life, mourning with festivity, tragedy with comedy, fiction with reality, compassion with cruelty, memory with amnesia, logic with absurd, providence with arbitrariness—indicating that these contrasting pairs are distinct yet inseparably related aspects of the human condition. Situated between these oppositions, Ros and Guil cannot act with certainty and conviction, whereas Hamlet procrastinates not because he hesitates, but because in this world absolute justice and absolute evil simply do not exist. These contradictions inevitably emerge in critical studies of R&GAD, since scholars offer perfectly plausible though conflicting interpretations of the play, as pointed out by John Fleming (2001: 50). For instance, when Sidney Homan examines the response of Ros and Guil to their confinement and limitations, he suggests that the protagonists engage in as little action as possible, leading the play into non-existence (1989: 114). By contrast, Jonathan Bennett, who also links acting with existing, argues that the characters are determined to act in order to remain real (1975: 79). In accordance with deconstructive dialectics, both the interpretations are possible and neither is more likely. This is further confirmed by contradictory approaches of the protagonists to their situation. In Act Three, Ros notes that ‘nothing is happening’ (Stoppard 1967: 80), yet later Guil tells him, ‘you don’t believe anything till it happens. And it has all happened. Hasn’t it?’ (1967: 84). Since the protagonists are ignorant of Shakespeare’s plot, its seemingly illogical and slow progress continuously disappoints them, yet, in fact they are part of an intricate intrigue that has already been staged on numerous occasions over the centuries. The time present of Ros and Guil is the time past of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Moreover, contradictory observations may be found within individual analyses of the play—for instance, Michael Scott (1989) and Joanna Kokot (2003) initially deny Stoppard’s play any deeper significance, reading it as a pure pastiche, yet eventually they both declare the drama to be a revealing interpretation of Hamlet. In a deconstructive framework, a contradictory attitude which Stoppard manifests towards Shakespeare’s tragedy might not only suggest

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Beckettian inspiration, but also a defiant response to a celebrated masterpiece, particularly if it is as unanimously admired as Hamlet. Discussing the relationship between the two plays, Peter Buse observes: the play [i.e. R&GAD] is sceptical about the automatic recognition from which it benefits. The parasite distrusts the special status of its host, calling into question the processes of legitimation leading to this status. It does so through pastiches of the tragic style and through ironic recapitulations of Hamlet’s tribulations. (2002: 59)

In R&GAD, however, Stoppard distrusts Hamlet not only as one of the greatest classics of Western drama, but also as a model of an absolutely determined reality, where the events do not follow their internal logic but Hamlet ’s script (Sugiera 1997: 25). This ontological and epistemological scepticism distinguishes Stoppard’s play from nineteenth-century burlesques of Hamlet, which tended to rely on purely comical strategies, such as localisation and debasement (Draudt 1998: 65–68; Scott 1989: 5). It also marks this drama as a deconstructive adaptation with a unique approach to action and the world of the play.

Action and Inaction In English, the noun ‘action’ and its verbal variant ‘to act’ correspond to a number of meanings. Stoppard focuses on two of them that are particularly relevant for drama—one related to doing things in real life and the other to impersonating dramatic characters on stage. Both are present in the following passage: Guil. But we don’t know what’s going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don’t know how to act. Player. Act natural. (1967: 51)

The exchange wittily exploits the ambiguity of the verb ‘to act.’ According to Sammells, it conflates the ‘action with acting, and the agent with the actor’ (2001: 110). While Ros and Guil reflect on their real deeds, searching for a logical explanation of their situation, the Player frustrates them further, responding with a remark that refers more to theatre than to life. Not only does he confuse spontaneous actions with scripted ones, but he also deliberately avoids singling out any of the two as true or at least, more true than the other (Sammells 2001: 110). Whether we agree with

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the Player’s proclamation of the world as a stage—the metaphor evidently borrowed from Shakespeare—or dismiss it, the problem of action remains fundamental to dramatic texts, conceived as theatre scripts that have some relationship to human behaviour and that are to be enact ed on stage. In a traditional play, the action is coherent and complete: in the course of events, an author introduces and transforms the characters, while exposing the laws governing the fictional world. In postmodern and postdramatic drama, however, there has been a tendency to undermine the consistency and the unity of action, which may function as a collage of scenes or a metatheatrical construct, revealing the fragmentation of reality and the protagonists’ identity (Sarrazac 2005: 23–28; Lehmann 2006). The dissolution of action in R&GAD reflects thus postmodern experimentation with dramatic form, but it also specifically challenges the conventions of tragedy as a historically and culturally distant genre. Although Renaissance dramatists took a more liberal approach to the Aristotelian rules concerning the setting, action, character, and style, they still aimed to capture some of the pathos and grandeur of ancient Greek theatre. By contrast, post-war playwrights like Stoppard have radically questioned the high status of tragedy by introducing informal language, common characters, and low-key conflicts. In R&GAD, central to this process is the portrayal of Ros and Guil as two ordinary fellows who are obviously disoriented in the world of Shakespeare’s tragedy and who fail to engage in consistent action. Commenting on the dramaturgy of Stoppard’s adaptation, Buse points out that Ros and Guil cannot substitute the Shakespearean hero, just as their story cannot replace the main plot of Hamlet (2002: 51). The two protagonists are incapable of undertaking grand enterprises; at best, they may react to the situations in which they find themselves. Because of their insignificance and incompetence, Ros and Guil play the roles of fools rather than heroes. Moreover, since they are not as eloquent or passionate as Hamlet, they cannot strike awe in the audience—their tragic destiny may at most evoke compassion. Stoppard’s use of supplement is thus highly ironic. Ros and Guil are given primary attention in this adaptation precisely to be denied the level of importance that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern enjoy in Hamlet. Although the two courtiers occupy a minor role in Shakespeare’s tragedy, they still contribute to the plot as Claudius’s accomplices, who only pretend to be uninformed to outsmart Hamlet. By contrast, in Stoppard’s version, Ros and Guil are denied even the role of manipulators—instead, they are passive victims, deprived of any influence over

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the events in Elsinore. This interpretation frees them from guilt, but it also deprives them of agency. To insist on the innocence of his protagonists, Stoppard has to emphasise their ignorance and ineptitude. The two courtiers are portrayed as ordinary men, a modern equivalent of medieval ‘everymen,’ who have involuntarily become involved in events beyond their comprehension and control. At the same time, they are Ros and Guil, supplementary versions of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, that is characters with roles clearly defined by Shakespeare’s script. When Guil complains to Ros, ‘And why us?—anybody would have done. And we have contributed nothing’ (1967: 72), he exposes the contradictory nature of the two protagonists—average individuals with a unique position in theatre history. Stoppard’s portrayal of the title protagonists exemplifies his deconstructive dialectics, while it also questions the very foundations of Shakespeare’s action, which appears as fragmentary and confusing. From the beginning, Ros and Guil do not understand their roles in Elsinore, and they are constantly disturbed by the entrances of other protagonists. In the first two acts, Stoppard’s reality develops next to Shakespeare’s plot, yet the modern characters do not complement the source but rather comment on it (Kokot 2003: 122), while the scenes borrowed from Hamlet confuse and frustrate them. In the third act, in which the dialogues are almost exclusively Stoppardian, the protagonists seem to have accepted the function of attendant lords, and Hamlet ’s plot no longer disrupts the action of R&GAD. Still, Shakespeare’s tragedy continues to haunt Stoppard’s play, which ends in the death of the two courtiers, who meekly face their own demise, which from the beginning has been announced for them in the title. When in the finale they accept the death sentence written for them by Hamlet (and Shakespeare), Stoppard’s protagonists acknowledge that their roles have been shaped by Shakespeare’s script. Acknowledging one’s destiny, however, does not mean comprehending it. Even in his final speech Ros asks in bewilderment, ‘What was it all about? When did it begin?’ (1967: 97). Ros and Guil feel lost in Shakespeare’s plot, because it generates constant interruptions and intrusions, over-demanding questions and orders, and unexpected turns of action. As Stoppard fragments and decontextualises scenes from Hamlet, he creates an atmosphere of absurdity and confusion. As a result of this, Ros and Guil continue to question the meaning of events until they disappear into darkness. Horatio’s promise to narrate all that has happened on

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stage is crucial here, since it gives some hope of explanation. And yet— what will Horatio tell? Is he knowledgeable enough to narrate the plot of R&GAD? What has actually happened in Stoppard’s drama? As in Hamlet, Horatio boasts that he will provide Fortinbras with a grand tale of cruel and shocking content: and let me speak to the yet unknowing world how these things came about: so shall you hear of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, of accidental judgments, casual slaughters, of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause, and, in this upshot, purposes mistook fallen on the inventors’ heads: all this can I truly deliver. (1967: 99)

In Hamlet, when Horatio summarises action of the tragedy (Shakespeare 2007: 5.2.363–370), the lines have their dignity and significance; in R&GAD, the passage becomes ironic, particularly from the perspective of the audience who has closely followed Stoppard’s drama. There are several layers of irony and deception in Horatio’s speech. The first one concerns the reference to ‘the yet unknowing world.’ Considering the widespread popularity of Hamlet since the nineteenth century, Western readers and spectators are more or less familiar with the story. Those who need reminders are supplied with summaries offered by the two main protagonists and the hint from the title, because, as Anthony Jenkins rightly notes, ‘Ros and Guil are dead, even before the play begins’ (1990: 52). Second, the promise to ‘truly deliver’ ‘how these things came about’ is an evident lie—Horatio lacks necessary information to provide a comprehensive account of events in Stoppard’s drama, where his role is significantly limited. Moreover, since he reduces Shakespeare’s story to the conventions of a bloody revenge tragedy (Kokot 2003: 138), his account bears little resemblance to the actual development of action in R&GAD. Finally, in the context of Stoppard’s play, Horatio’s focus on violent, terrifying incidents makes him sound affected and theatrical to the point that his words resemble the Player’s pretentious description of the tragedy genre: Deaths and disclosures, universal and particular, denouements both unexpected and inexorable, transvestite melodrama on all levels including the suggestive. We transport you into a world of intrigue and illusion… clowns,

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if you like, murderers – we can do you ghosts and battles, on the skirmish level, heroes, villains, tormented lovers – set pieces in the poetic vein; we can do you rapiers or rape or both, by all means, faithless wives and ravished virgins – flagrante delicto at a price, but that comes under realism for which there are special terms. (1967: 17)

In this speech, the Player aims at convincing Ros and Guil to pay for the performance that is about to begin, whereas Horatio delivers his address when the events have already taken place. The passages, however, display striking similarities in terms of their rhetoric and purpose. Both the Player and Horatio embellish their accounts to impress their listeners rather than to inform them. What would be, thus, an accurate account of action in Stoppard’s play? The playwright bases his drama on trivial episodes rather than terrifying incidents; in the background he rehearses tropes from a bloody revenge tragedy, yet in the foreground he explores the theatrical potential of the Beckettian stagnation. Seen in this light, Horatio’s speech might serve the dramatist to emphasise the contrast between grand deeds of Hamlet and frivolous linguistic games that dominate R&GAD. Such view, however, is too simplistic, since tragic enterprises are devoid of their solemnity, whereas the linguistic games have a deeper significance. Even though Ros and Guil are involved in a violent plot, which the Player describes as ‘[a] slaughterhouse—eight corpses all told’ (1967: 65), they do not participate in a coherent action, but they are rather involved in loosely related episodes. When at the end of Act Two, Ros expresses hope that ‘anything could happen yet’ (1967: 75), he exposes the passivity of the first two acts. In Act Three, when the protagonists hear the music announcing the Players, they expect that it might finally bring desirable action (1967: 88), yet even in the last scenes, they still do not become agents originating their proper deeds. Instead, until the end, ‘things happen’ to them—they have a letter stolen, or they are attacked by pirates (Kokot 2003: 122). Left alone, they are busy playing games (Buse 2002: 63). Despite being involuntarily implicated in Shakespeare’s intrigue, Ros and Guil do not become part of consistent and complete action. Instead, they only experience unconnected episodes from Hamlet, or, as Ros emphatically exclaims, ‘Incidents! All we get is incidents! Dear God, is it too much to expect a little sustained action?!’ (1967: 91). Until their final disappearance, Ros and Guil vainly strive to grasp the meaning of Shakespeare’s plot, in order to understand how to act

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better. The two protagonists are constantly bewildered as to what they should do—bewildered not only because of inherent contradictions in their reality, but also as a result of their memory loss (Bennett 1975: 85). Since they do not remember the past and are incapable of retaining their newly acquired knowledge, their decisions are not motivated by experience, which makes their actions appear as arbitrary and chaotic. Simultaneously, their reflections acquire an existential dimension, because the protagonists begin to question the world around them, searching for their origins and identity, as well as for the supreme logic of events in which they participate. Despite remembering Shakespeare’s lines, Ros and Guil cannot understand their meaning—having forgotten their origins, they lack the context. As Guil observes about their presence at the Danish court, ‘We only know what we’re told, and that’s little enough. And for all we know it isn’t even true’ (1967: 51). The juxtaposition of memory and amnesia is thus central to the development of action and the world of Stoppard’s play.

Memory and Amnesia Constructing his adaptation around memory and amnesia, Stoppard does away with a traditional dramatic exposition, which could explain the situation in Elsinore not only to the audience, but also to Ros and Guil. From the first scenes, the two courtiers are acutely aware of the fact that they must have forgotten something important: Guil. […] What’s the first thing you remember? Ros. Ah. (Pause.) No, it’s no good, it’s gone. It was a long time ago. Guil. (Patient but edged.) You don’t get my meaning. What is the first thing after all the things you’ve forgotten? Ros. Oh I see. (Pause.) I’ve forgotten the question. (1967: 11)

Throughout the play, Ros and Guil obsessively strive to recall ‘the first thing they remember,’ the initial point of the story. The impossibility of tracing origins of their condition results from their amnesia, but it also reflects a particular position of Hamlet in Western culture. The story of the Danish prince and his attendant lords has multiple beginnings, which can be found in several source texts and in each new Shakespeare adaptation.

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The multiplicity of beginnings means that even though Ros and Guil are obsessively seeking to reconstruct the past, they are incapable of establishing one definite starting point of their story. In their memories, they can only vaguely recall the morning when they were summoned by a messenger to travel to the castle. They indistinctly remember someone waking them up at the sun dawn and ordering them to set on a journey. Their description is strikingly imprecise: the envoy from Elsinore is constantly referred to as ‘a man,’ ‘a foreigner,’ ‘a messenger,’ always with the indefinite article, whilst the action is in passive tense and thus lacking the agent. ‘We were sent for’ (1967: 13), announces Ros. This opens a number of questions. Whose orders were these? What are the protagonists sent for? Why them? Later in the play, Ros and Guil still return to the moment of being summoned—recollecting it with more detail, yet without ever managing to go beyond that morning, further back into the past. Guil subsequently evokes the following image: A man standing in his saddle in the half-lit half-alive dawn banged on the shutters and called two names. He was just a hat and a cloak levitating in the grey plume of his own breath, but when he called we came. (1967: 30)

The recollection now includes the description of the messenger’s apparel, yet it still does not contain such crucial details as the information who sent the orders and why. The meeting is presented as a self-contained image, with no link to the past and unclear connection with the future. Consequently, the two protagonists feel disoriented about their purpose and identity. To reinforce the theme of memory loss, Stoppard introduces name confusion between Ros and Guil. He borrows this concept from Shakespeare, yet he fully exploits its comic potential—as well as its tragic implications. In Hamlet, Claudius and Gertrude seem slightly unsure as to how they should address the two courtiers (Shakespeare 2007: 2.2.33–34). In R&GAD, the uncertainty is more evident, because of specific instructions in the stage directions, and because later the protagonists themselves admit that the King cannot distinguish between them (1967: 81). Stoppard further extends the comic device in his adaptation, making Ros and Guil forget their own names, which gives rise to comic scenes in the play. Typically of a deconstructive adaptation, these scenes have serious implications for the protagonists. Bennett points out that it is the loss of memory which makes the characters uncertain about

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their names, and memory is crucial for accumulating knowledge, which in turn contributes to the formation of identity (1975: 87). Guil, who tends to be more sensitive and reflective than his companion, suddenly realises profound implications of the name confusion during a game that consists in responding to questions with questions. The chain of interrogations exchanged between the protagonists reflects their disorientation and makes Guil recognise the terrifying consequence of forgetting one’s own name: Guil. (Seriously.) What’s your name? Ros. What’s yours? Guil. I asked you first. Ros. Statement. One – love. Guil. What’s your name when you’re at home? Ros. What’s yours? Guil. When I’m at home? Ros. Is it different at home? Guil. What home? Ros. Haven’t you got one? Guil. Why do you ask? Ros. What are you driving at? Guil. (With emphasis.) What’s your name? Ros. Repetition! Two – love. Match point to me. Guil. (Seizing him violently.) WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? Ros. Rhetoric! Game and match! (1967: 33–34)

Guil continues to ask about the name, even if his persistence costs him points and leads to his defeat in the interrogation match. First, he makes a statement, and then he repeats the question with emphasis, as if to demonstrate its extraordinary importance. The question ‘WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?’ suggests that Guil is painfully aware that the loss of name leads to the loss of identity. Simultaneously, the questions are part of a game, and even the last one might not be an expression of true feelings but merely ‘rhetoric,’ in accordance with Ros’s interpretation, which would turn all potential seriousness into a jest. In this manner, Stoppard seems to be constantly playing with the audience: putting on a serious face in the middle of a comic game, only to reveal the joke in the very next moment. Without ever losing its comic potential, the name amnesia reflects the existential condition of feeling abandoned and insecure in the world,

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particularly since Ros and Guil have forgotten more than their names— they have also lost basic skills, such as spelling, and primary experiences, such as the first moment of realising one’s mortality. The protagonists themselves state the connection between forgetting their names and forgetting the spelling of ordinary words, suggesting that the disintegration of their world has become complete (1967: 29). Deprived of their memory, Ros and Guil are left with questions without answers and indistinct impressions of what has been lost. When Ros talks about the first moment of realising one’s mortality, he is incapable of reviving it; he only realises that it is missing. Throughout the play, the protagonists continue to find voids in their personal and collective memory of Hamlet, accumulating doubts and insecurities. Their behaviour suggests that a forgotten or repressed experience is not fully absent, but rather remains as a trace. However, since traces cannot provide Ros and Guil with clear knowledge, in order to remain active and survive at the court, they have to accept their amnesia. The amnesia of Ros and Guil in Stoppard’s play is symptomatic of a broader cultural amnesia of contemporary spectators, who might have forgotten the key plot elements from Shakespeare’s tragedy. To remind Shakespeare’s storyline to the audience as well as to themselves, the protagonists summarise the situation in Elsinore four times (1967: 38, 39, 44, 87). Since the process of synopsis inevitably involves comprehension and selection (Zacchi 1990: 87), it reveals how the two courtiers understand their situation, but also how the plot of Hamlet might have been perceived in the 1960s—particularly since Ros and Guil speak the twentieth-century language between themselves, and they suggest several analogies between their knowledge and that of the audience. A prominent example of the plot synopsis occurs when the protagonists act out an interrogation of Hamlet, with Guil impersonating the prince and Ros acting as his investigator. In the course of the examination, Guil recapitulates the main political events in Denmark: Ros. Let me get it straight. Your father was king. You were his only son. Your father dies. You are of age. Your uncle becomes king. […] Where were you? Guil. In Germany. Ros. Usurpation, then. Guil. He slipped in. Ros. Which reminds me. Guil. Well, it would.

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Ros. I don’t want to be personal. Guil. It’s common knowledge. Ros. Your mother’s marriage. Guil. He slipped in. (1967: 38)

Summarising the situation in Elsinore, Guil concentrates on patrimony and politics, which are also the focus of Margreta de Grazia’s interpretation of Hamlet (2007), yet he reduces ethical problems of the tragedy to coarse acts of ‘usurpation’ and adultery. The subtleties of the source are in this synopsis degraded to raw facts narrated in crude language. An analogy between the process of reduction articulated by Guil and a popular reception of Hamlet is suggested by the protagonist himself, who seems to be realising that the events in Elsinore constitute ‘common knowledge’ not only to the courtiers, but also to those members of the audience who are only roughly acquainted with Shakespeare’s plot. A similarly metatheatrical comment is made when Ros recapitulates the events preceding the proper action of Hamlet (1967: 39), and Guil observes, ‘But all that is well known, common property. Yet he sent for us. And we did come’ (1967: 39). ‘Common property’ like ‘common knowledge’ might refer to the experience of fictional characters in Elsinore as well as many readers and spectators of Hamlet —the adjective ‘common’ suggests not only the body of shared values, but also a rudimentary level of acquaintance with Shakespeare’s story. Another noteworthy case of recapitulation occurs when Ros summarises the results of Hamlet’s examination by the two protagonists: Six rhetorical and two repetition, leaving nineteen, of which we answered fifteen. And what did we get in return? He’s depressed! … Denmark’s a prison and he’d rather live in a nutshell; some shadow-play about the nature of ambition, which never got down to cases, and finally one direct question which might have led somewhere, and led in fact to his illuminating claim to tell a hawk from a handsaw. (1967: 44)

In this brilliant passage, which filters Hamlet’s observations through the sensitivity of Stoppard’s characters, Ros piles up some of the most famous quotations from the tragedy: ‘Denmark’s prison,’ ‘he’d rather live in a nutshell,’ ‘some shadow play about the nature of ambition,’ ‘his illuminating claim to tell a hawk from a handsaw.’ Taken out of context, however, the quotations sound like clichés, while the selective

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synopsis renders Hamlet’s behaviour ridiculous and incomprehensible. Summarising the events in Elsinore, Ros and Guil do not offer a coherent version of Shakespeare’s plot, but rather express their questions and doubts about the intentions of the characters and the meaning of their actions. The protagonists share their interrogative, epistemologically suspicious inclination with Hamlet, yet they function as his negatives, since contrary to the prince for whom ‘[f]orgetfulness is impossible’ (Knight 1970: 19), they are troubled by amnesia. Their condition makes them unable to understand the world around them, despite numerous clues provided by the Players. This, in turn, leads to a continuous tension between logic and absurdity in R&GAD.

Logic and Absurdity Describing the tradition of the Theatre of the Absurd, Ruby Cohn points to the lack of logical links as its defining feature (1976: 217). Such description assumes that logic is a necessary component of absurd. Indeed, in R&GAD there is a constant interplay between logic and absurdity that underlies the setting, characterisation, language, and plot. Events in this adaptation defy causality, since they develop in a limbo, where physical laws are suspended, the behaviour of the characters has no psychological motivation, the conventional rules of communication are broken, and the action does not progress in a linear manner, but follows a circular pattern. At the same time, the play is an exceptional example of a deconstructive adaptation because it brings together two distinctive orders—that of Shakespeare’s tragedy and that of Stoppard’s postmodern drama—in a dialectical relationship. This means that R&GAD is characterised by the combination of fate and randomness, as well as supreme knowledge of the audience and the limited understanding of Ros and Guil. At the outset, Stoppard emphasises empty and vacuous qualities of the play’s setting. The characters are placed in an indeterminate location in the first two acts, in which the bareness of the stage and the indistinctiveness of the time perspective deprive the action of defined context, until Act Three, in which Ros and Guil find themselves on a boat. The opening stage directions describe ‘[t]wo Elizabethans passing time in a place without much visible character’ (1967: 7; italics added); subsequently, we learn that ‘Guil gets up but has nowhere to go,’ whereas when spinning the coin, he focuses on ‘his environment or lack of it’

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(1967: 8). It is also because of the bareness of the background, and not only as a result of his memory loss, that when Ros complains that he wants to go home, he realises that he has lost sense of direction (1967: 30). The emptiness of the stage is complemented by the initial suspension of time, when the coins stubbornly fall on heads, and the accumulation of the same results inevitably strikes the protagonists as absurd (1967: 9). To explain this extraordinary situation, Guil makes a hypothesis that ‘time has stopped dead, and the single experience of one coin being spun once has been repeated ninety times’ (1967: 11). Although he immediately rejects this idea, he leaves the audience with a possibility that while the time has been paused, the law of probability might have been violated. By removing the appearances of realism from Ros’s and Guil’s actions and dialogues, Stoppard also undermines the psychological consistency of characters. Even though most of the time Ros and Guil are waiting for others to come, which fits with their role of attendants, they are mostly surprised by the entrances of Shakespeare’s characters. And yet, despite their surprise, each time they manage to perfectly follow Shakespeare’s scenario, which deprives their actions of psychological probability. Ros realises that he and Guil cannot behave as individuals, because they must surrender their personality when faced with Shakespeare’s heroes (1967: 58). The anti-realistic behaviour of Ros and Guil is further emphasised by the illogical nature of their dialogue. The two courtiers, like other characters in Stoppard’s plays, do not speak a ‘postmodern babble of tongues,’ which distinguishes them from other non-traditional protagonists, such as those of Heiner Müller (Heuvel 2001: 219–220), yet their speeches are characterised by surprising chains of associations. One of the most striking examples of their playful manner of speaking concerns the phenomenon of speech inhibition: Guil. Now mind your tongue, or we’ll have it out and throw the rest of you away, like a nightingale at a Roman feast. Ros. Took the very words out of my mouth. Guil You’d be lost for words. Ros You’d be tongue-tied. Guil Like a mute in a monologue. Ros Like a nightingale at a Roman feast. Guil Your diction will go to pieces. Ros Your lines will be cut. Guil To dumbshows. Ros And dramatic pauses. Guil You’ll never find your tongue.

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Ros Lick your lips. Guil Taste your tears. Ros Your breakfast. Guil You won’t know the difference. Ros There won’t be any. Guil Will take the very words out of your mouth. Ros So you’ve caught on. Guil So you’ve caught up. (1967: 49)

The excerpt is cited at length to show the abundance of repetitions and parallel constructions that represent either analogous examples of an idea (‘Like a mute in a monologue/Like a nightingale at a Roman feast’) or linguistic variants (‘So you’ve caught on/So you’ve caught up’). Such elaborate constructions function ironically in a passage that addresses muteness and language depravation. The linguistic issue acquires literal meaning through the reference to ‘a nightingale at a Roman feast’—an allusion to a story about the tongue removal and non-verbal communication, which appears in literary texts representing different genres and historical periods. Three versions of this story seem particularly relevant in the context of R&GAD as an example of a deconstructive supplement. The source of the nightingale story may be found in Metamorphoses (1992), where Ovid narrates the myth of Philomela, raped by Tereus, the husband of her sister, Procne. Although her tongue has been cut out, the victim manages to communicate the crime to her sister by weaving a tapestry, on which she represents her horrifying experience. In an act of revenge, Procne murders Itys, the son she had with Tereus, and serves him as a dish to her husband. Having discovered the murder, Tereus pursues the two sisters to kill them, yet before the chase ends, they are all changed into birds—Tereus into a hoopoe, Procne into a swallow, whilst Philomela into a nightingale (1992: VI. 412–674). The Philomela myth also resonates on at least two levels in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus , where Titus’s daughter Lavinia is raped by Chiron and Demetrius and then deprived of her tongue and hands (1995: 2.2.184–191; 2.3.1–57; 3.1.59–150). The protagonist not only incarnates the story of the classical heroine, ‘[r]avished and wronged as Philomela was’ (1995: 4.1.52), but she also explicitly refers to it. Determined to expose her wrongdoers, Lavinia continuously points to the Philomela passage in Metamorphoses (1992: 4.1.1–60). The echoes of Philomela’s tragic fate may be also found

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in The Waste Land, where on two occasions Eliot refers to the voice of a poor nightingale ‘[s]o rudely forced’ (1952: 2.100; 3.205). Each of the three authors emphasises different aspects of the myth as a story that involves a wide spectrum of strong and mostly destructive emotions: desire, disgust, love, hatred, compassion, and fury. In Metamorphoses and Titus Andronicus , the focus is on ruthless revenge— executed without procrastination and interrogation that are characteristic of Hamlet. When Titus denies mercy to Tamora’s first-born son, Alarbus, and has him killed in religious sacrifice, the Queen of Goths vows to punish Titus for his cruelty. Lavinia’s rape and mutilation are part of the cycle of brutality and suffering in the play. Similarly, Eliot chooses to underline dark and disturbing aspects of the Ovidian myth. In The Waste Land, the allusions to Philomela occur in ‘A Game of Chess’ and ‘The Fire Sermon.’ In both sections, the mythological reference signals the themes of sexual abuse and female suppression, with sexual activity being described as marital duty or mechanical activity. In contrast to these examples, Stoppard’s reference to Philomela’s story focuses neither on revenge or rape, which are the most dramatic elements of the myth, but rather on that component of the story which is the least expressive, both literally and symbolically: Ros and Guil discuss the condition of speech deprivation. The Stoppardian emphasis is as antiheroic as his choice of two attendant lords as protagonists of his drama. Most importantly, the image of being ‘tongue-tied,’ along with Stoppard’s approach to the mythological source, provides important insights into the function of Hamlet in the play. It shows how Ros and Guil are victims of linguistic suppression. They are denied their own language when confronted with Shakespeare’s characters, who enforce the Renaissance diction with its archaic form and confusing rhetoric. At the same time, in a playful spirit of deconstruction, the excerpt is an ironic example of verbosity employed to describe muteness. The Philomela passage in Stoppard’s drama is representative of the protagonists’ manner of speaking: linguistic games of Ros and Guil are dominated by irony and paradox, whereas their dialogues abound in contradictory statements, repetitions, and multi-layered intertextual allusions. Stoppard’s juxtaposition of the Shakespearean rhetoric with the twentieth-century language of Ros and Guil brings humour into the play. However, it also mocks formal, elevated diction, which is typical of the tragedy genre (Buse 2002: 58), and it emphasises the difference between

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Ros, Guil, and the Players on the one hand and Shakespeare’s characters on the other (Kokot 2003: 114). At the same time, just as comic dialogues in R&GAD contribute to an absurd vision of dramatic reality, they also lead to pessimistic observations about the inefficiency or even impossibility of communication. The deconstruction of dramatic reality in the play occurs on the level of action as well as language already from the first scenes, when the spinning of coins coincides with the spinning of words. Neither the game nor the dialogue can provide the protagonists with meaning; instead, they experience the dissolution of physical laws and linguistic rules. As Ros and Guil are spinning the coins, they keep repeating simple gestures and words in a game that brings no change, no turns of action. The iterative nature of their behaviour suggests that the protagonists are trapped in an absurd reality, but it also emphasises their status as characters from a famous play, whose lines are frequently spoken on stages in different parts of the world. This double status of the protagonists becomes particularly apparent towards the end. Just before his disappearance, Guil declares, ‘Well, we’ll know better next time’ (1967: 98), yet the audience realises that he is mistaken, regardless of whether he speaks as a character inside the play or a dramatic persona endowed with metatheatrical conscience similar to Luigi Pirandello’s protagonists. There will be no ‘next time’ for the two courtiers in the Stoppardian reality, since when they exit, they die, never to reappear. Guil should be able to understand it himself, since earlier he has explained death as the final departure, or, in the formula of deconstructive dialectics, ‘the absence of presence’ (1967: 97). The statement is also false when we consider Ros and Guil as dramatic characters. Even though most likely there will be another occasion when their parts are performed, the protagonists will not ‘know better’ then. Each time the actors take the roles of Hamlet’s friends, they perform their ignorance of Shakespeare’s plot to complete the cyclic pattern of Stoppard’s drama. R&GAD has a non-linear, absurdist structure that defies any expectation of progress. In the first published version, the two English ambassadors who appear at the end are sent for, like Ros and Guil (Fleming 2001: 51). Although this ending was removed from subsequent editions, Cohn insists that it is still possible to assume that the ambassadors arriving in the finale of Stoppard’s play to announce the death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are to replace the two attendant lords and repeat their fate (1976: 216). According to some critics, the circular ending is inscribed

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within the very structure of the play that abounds in recurrent themes, linguistic expressions, and music tunes (Corballis qtd. in Fleming 2001: 51). Furthermore, Stoppard explicitly draws the readers’ attention to repetitions in the play, as when he describes the melody associated with the Players as ‘a familiar tune which has been heard three times before’ (1967: 89). In some cases, repetitions have a comic potential: for instance, when Hamlet standing at the footlights spits into the audience and soon after wipes his eyes, as if the spitting were returned (1967: 91). More often, however, recurring images from Shakespeare’s tragedy suggest that the characters are trapped in situations over which they have no control, as it is symbolised in the image of the boat in the final act. The condition of Ros and Guil constitutes, thus, a peculiar combination of randomness and logic, or, putting it differently, illusive freedom and impenetrable determinism, which becomes symbolised in the image of the sea journey (Bennett 1975: 81). Guil describes the journey as drifting towards a fixed direction: Free to move, speak, extemporize, and yet. We have not been cut loose. Our truancy is defined by one fixed star, and our drift represents merely a slight change of angle to it: we may seize the moment, toss it around while the moments pass, a short dash here, an exploration there, but we are brought round full circle to face again the single immutable fact – that we, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, bearing a letter from one king to another, are taking Hamlet to England. (1967: 79)

At first, Guil claims with confidence to like boats, because there ‘[y]ou don’t have to worry about which way to go, or whether to go at all—the question doesn’t arise, because you’re on a boat, aren’t you?’ (1967: 78). Soon, however, his words become ‘couched in qualifications’ (Buse 2002: 57) when he recognises that ‘[o]ne is free on a boat. For a time. Relatively’ (1967: 79). An analogous procedure, which consists in modifying a speech with adverbs that challenge or even contradict the message of the speaker, occurs again when Ros puts in doubt Guil’s declaration that the boat provides them with freedom: Guil. […] We are not restricted. No boundaries have been defined, no inhibitions imposed. […] We can do what we like and say what we like to whomever we like, without restriction. Ros. Within limits, of course. Guil. Certainly within limits. (1967: 90–91)

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In the course of the dialogue, freedom ‘without restriction’ subtly changes into freedom ‘within limits,’ which defines more appropriately the condition of Ros and Guil, who act within the limitations imposed on them by the script and the stage boundaries. Ros and Guil as reflections of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are trapped in the situations and dialogues from Hamlet, just as their activity is restricted by the playing space— the stage wings constrain their actions and expose them to the intrusion of other protagonists (Kokot 2003: 127). Later the sea journey allows Ros and Guil to escape deadly intrigues in Elsinore—only to lead them to inevitable execution. The protagonists are moving, yet they cannot choose their direction. The paradox aptly captures the dialectical relationship between logic and absurdity that underlines the experience of the title characters and the contrast in their knowledge and the knowledge of the audience. The tension between logic and absurdity in Stoppard’s play substantially relies on the discrepancy between the ignorance of the title protagonists and the omniscience of the audience. As Jenkins argues, the world of R&GAD is not absurd—there are rules, and even if Ros and Guil are not aware of them, the spectators, because of their familiarity with Hamlet, can certainly see them (1990: 53). Although the situation of the two attendant lords waiting in ignorance for someone to come and for something to happen resembles the condition of Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1965), the perspective of Beckett’s audience drastically differs from that of Stoppard’s, since in the former case the readers/spectators are supplied with as little information as the two famous tramps, while in the latter they might rely on their familiarity with Hamlet (Jenkins 1990: 53). At the same time, according to Cohn, Ros and Guil ‘lack certainty, identity, memory’ more than Beckett’s Didi and Gogo (1976: 216). Thus, in R&GAD the audience’s knowledge is in inverse proportion to the knowledge of the title protagonists. Jenkins further claims that ‘[i]n the Stoppard play, life only seems absurd because of the limitations of one’s own particular angle’ (1990: 53), whereas ‘from a wider angle Rosencrantz presumes a coherent world’ (1990: 60). However, even if audience members are able to clarify some of the questions in Stoppard’s plot thanks to their knowledge of Shakespeare’s tragedy, they still have to accept that Ros and Guil behave in an inconsistent manner, which is an inevitable consequence of Stoppard’s use of

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supplement. Describing the relationship between the script and the audience, Brater points to an inherent link between adaptation and absence in the reception of Stoppard’s play: No more court scenes, graveyards, or ghostly apparitions. Stoppard is relying on his audience to fill in the blanks. […] Too clever by half, those absences tell us a lot, and they will do so on several complementary levels. What happens on the level of stagecraft also happens on the level of this play’s reinvented dialogue. (2001: 204)

The passage describes Stoppard’s adaptation as a process of removing rather than adding material to the source. It shows that even though R&GAD seems to be complementing Hamlet, it poses more questions than answers to the audience. Such strategy is supported by the tradition of the Theatre of the Absurd, but it also reflects a distinctive approach to adaptation as deconstruction.

Conclusion It is in the spirit of deconstruction that Stoppard challenges such features of traditional dramatic texts as presence, coherence, and semantic closure; simultaneously, he reveals the paradoxical nature of action, characters, and language. Supplementing the story of Hamlet, the playwright challenges not only the logic of Shakespeare’s plot, but also the logic of dramatic action and the dramatic universe more broadly. He does so by depriving the events of their causality, probability, and consistency. Stoppard’s play might be thus seen as a dramatic response to deconstruction. More specifically, describing R&GAD as a supplement of Hamlet in the Derridean sense means recognising irreconcilable oppositions within the source play and its adaptation, as well as interpreting the relationship between the two dramas through the principle of dialectics. A similar strategy of adaptation might be observed in Birch and Mitchell’s Ophelias Zimmer, which is provocatively anti-heroic in its detailed exploration of patriarchal structures.

References Barthes, Roland. 1991. Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers. New York: The Noonday Press/Farrar Straus & Giroux.

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Beckett, Samuel. 1965. Waiting for Godot. A Tragicomedy in Two Acts. London: Faber and Faber. Bennett, Jonathan. 1975. ‘Philosophy and Mr Stoppard.’ In Critical Essays on Tom Stoppard, edited by Anthony Jenkins, 73–87. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co. Brater, Enoch. 2001. ‘Tom Stoppard’s Brit/Lit/Crit.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, edited by Katherine Kelly, 203–212. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Buse, Peter. 2002. ‘Hamlet Games—Stoppard with Lyotard’. In Drama + Theory: Critical Approaches to Modern British Drama, by Peter Buse, 50–68. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Calderwood, James. 1983. To Be and Not to Be: Negation and Metadrama in Hamlet. New York: Columbia University Press. Cohn, Ruby. 1976. Modern Shakespeare Offshoots. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1981. ‘Positions: Interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine, and Guy Scarpetta.’ In Positions, by Jacques Derrida. Translated by Alan Bass, 37–96. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1982. ‘Différance.’ In Margins of Philosophy, by Jacques Derrida. Translated by Alan Bass, 1–27. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Draudt, Manfred. 1998. ‘Nineteenth Century Burlesques of Hamlet in London and Vienna.’ In Hamlet East-West, edited by Marta Gibinska ´ and Jerzy Limon, 64–84. Gdansk: ´ Theatrum Gedanense Foundation. Eliot, T. S. 1952. ‘The Waste Land.’ The Waste Land and Other Poems, by T. S. Eliot, 25–51. London: Faber and Faber. Eliot, T.S. 1968. Four Quartets. London: Faber and Faber. Fleming, John. 2001. Stoppard’s Theatre. Finding Order amid Chaos. Austin: University of Texas Press. de Grazia, Margreta. 2007. Hamlet Without Hamlet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heuvel, Michael Vanden. 2001. ‘Is Postmodernism?’: Stoppard Among/Against the Postmoderns.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, edited by Katherine Kelly, 213–228. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Homan, Sidney. 1989. The Audience as Actor and Character. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Hudson, Roger, Catherine Itzin, and Simon Trussler. 1974. ‘Ambushes for the Audience: Towards a High Comedy of Ideas.’ Theatre Quarterly 4.14 (MayJuly): 3–17. Jenkins, Anthony. 1990. Death in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: II. In Critical Essays on Tom Stoppard, edited by Anthony Jenkins, 50–62. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co.

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Knight, G. Wilson. 1970. The Wheel of Fire. Interpretations of Shakespearean Tragedy. London: Methuen. Kokot, Joanna. 2003. ‘All the World’s a Stage’; Theatre-Within-Theatre Convention in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.’ Conventions and Texts, edited by Andrzej Zgorzelski, 113–139. Gdansk: ´ Uniwersytet Gdanski. ´ Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 2006. Postdramatic Theatre. Translated by Karen JürsMunby. London and New York: Routledge. Levenson, Jill L. 2001. Stoppard’s Shakespeare: Textual re-visions. In The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, edited by Katherine Kelly, 154–170. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mayne, Richard. 1972. Arts Commentary. In Tom Stoppard in Conversation, edited by Paul Delaney, 33–37. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Ovid. 1992. Metamorphoses V-VIII . Translated and edited by D. E. Hill. Warminster: Aris & Phillips. Sammells, Neil. 2001. ‘The Early Stage Plays.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, edited by Katherine Kelly, 104–119. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sarrazac, Jean-Pierre, ed. 2005. Lexique du drame moderne et contemporain. Belval: Circé. Scott, Michael. 1989. Shakespeare and the Modern Dramatist. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Shakespeare, William. 1995. Titus Andronicus. Edited by Jonathan Bate. The Arden Shakespeare. Third Series. London and New York: Routledge. Shakespeare, William. 2007. Hamlet. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. The Arden Shakespeare. Third Series. London: Thomson Learning. Smith, John H. 1987. ‘U-Topian Hegel: Dialectic and Its Other in Poststructuralism.’ The German Quarterly 60.2 (Spring): 237–261. Stoppard, Tom. 1967. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. A Play in Three Acts. New York: Samuel French. Sugiera, Małgorzata. 1997. Wariacje szekspirowskie w powojennym dramacie europejskim. Kraków: Universitas. Zacchi, Romana. 1990. ‘Raccontare Hamlet.’ In Hamlet dal testo alla scena, edited by Mariangela Tempera, 87–97. Bologna: Editricie Cooperativa.

CHAPTER 4

Ophelias Zimmer, Alice Birch and Katie Mitchell

Ophelias Zimmer offers a feminist perspective on using the supplement to subvert the source and its stage representation. The adaptation introduces a woman-focused approach to Shakespeare’s tragedy in that it places Ophelia and her world at the centre. At the same time, however, it resists temptation to use Ophelia’s story as a way of completing and clarifying the source plot. By combining these two approaches, Alice Birch and Katie Mitchell establish a critical relationship with a canonical text. Their interpretation of Hamlet is defined by rigorous adherence to its rules in a way that brutally exposes the patriarchal logic of the source tragedy. The following analysis of Ophelias Zimmer is based on Birch’s unpublished script and the Royal Court Theatre performance, which I watched live on 20 May 2016. In an interview with Bryce Lease, Mitchell has articulated her feminist view on the classics, which explains her process of adaptation: ‘At the beginning of my career a lot of the houses where I worked did mainly classical texts and I was always keen to find stories with women at the centre and, as I was not into comedies, I sought out tragedies’ (Mitchell qtd. in Lease 2020: 255). Ophelias Zimmer is a dark retelling of Shakespeare’s text, with an emphasis on the heroine’s intimidation, frustration, and despair. The adaptation follows Ophelia’s experiences in Hamlet, meticulously documenting nine days before her suicide, with the action taking

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place exclusively in the protagonist’s bedroom. The majority of Shakespeare’s plot is represented only through sound, with the events on stage limited to a narrow repertoire of activities allowed to the eponymous character. Consequently, Birch’s script is stripped of linguistic virtuosity and vibrant action; instead, the focus is on recurring gestures, words, and pauses, which gradually reveal the confined and threatening character of Ophelia’s environment. As such, the adaptation frustrates the audience expectations on multiple levels. Dramatically, it fails to satisfy our curiosity about Ophelia’s relationship with other characters; dramaturgically, it disappoints as a repetition of monotonous and mundane actions; theatrically, it disturbs the dominant tradition of staging the play as an exploration of male ambitions and anxieties—the tradition that has been prominent both in the UK and on the Continent.

Hamlet ’s Theatre Tradition Given great reverence paid to Shakespeare in the UK, it is remarkable for how long a renowned British director like Mitchell, operating in mainstream theatre institutions, such as the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, had managed to stay away from his plays. Tom Cornford and Caridad Svich write that although Mitchell would stage canonical playwrights, she ‘has conspicuously avoided Shakespeare, directing only Henry VI: The Battle for the Throne (RSC, 1994)’ and ‘[w]hen she returned to Shakespeare 21 years later, it was to collaborate with writer Alice Birch and scenographer Chloe Lamford to produce an adaptation of Hamlet, Ophelias Zimmer (Schaubühne Berlin and Royal Court, 2015)’ (2020: 138). It is equally telling that when she chose to work on a major Shakespeare’s play like Hamlet, she critically addressed dominant British and German, male-dominated models of directing and acting this tragedy. Although Mitchell has not sought to define herself as a director through staging Shakespeare, her critical perspective on Hamlet in Ophelias Zimmer might have been inspired by her earlier, small-scale exploration of Shakespeare’s tragedy—Five Truths , a video installation from 2011 at the V&A Museum in London. In this educational resource Mitchell, together with the actress Michelle Terry, proposed five scenes showing Ophelia shortly before her drowning, with her death narrated through a voice-over of Gertrude’s speech. Each scene was performed in the style of a director included in school curricula: Antonin Artaud,

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Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Constantin Stanislavsky. The five versions were screened simultaneously, with audience members immersed in the projections shown in a black box structure. According to Benjamin Fowler, the installation ‘demolished the myth of a singular Truth that is the grail of positivist and logocentric quests’ (2021: 68). Seen in this light, it tested a deconstructive approach to Hamlet that Mitchell was to explore fully in Ophelias Zimmer. Five Truths confronted the male-dominated tradition of staging Shakespeare’s tragedy that is associated with a series of celebrated male directors guiding the most charismatic male actors of their time as Hamlets. It also questioned the authority of famous Hamlet versions that have captured the audience attention as perfect and final readings of Shakespeare’s tragedy. At the same time, as a female-designed and a woman-oriented take on Hamlet, the installation redressed the patriarchal model of the play’s production. A similar combination of deconstruction and feminism informs Ophelias Zimmer. In conversation with Lily Kelting (2015), Vicky Featherstone, Royal Court’s Artistic Director, revealed that Mitchell had been often invited to direct Hamlet, but she was reluctant to work on this play, since she saw it as male-focused. Approaching it later in her career and directing it with two of her female collaborators, she was able to explore more explicitly gender politics embedded in this tragedy and its stage tradition. Featherstone humorously described Mitchell, Birch, and Lamford working together as a ‘triumvirate’ or ‘a girl band’ to emphasise the collective nature of their creative process (qtd. in Kelting 2015). Although Ophelias Zimmer, like any other theatrical production, results from shared efforts of a number of artistic contributors, for simplicity, throughout the chapter I will mainly refer to this staging by evoking Mitchell as a director and mastermind behind the whole project. Such approach is in fact prevalent in reviews and scholarly examinations of this adaptation, which emphasise the director’s overarching vision in the German tradition of Regietheater (director’s theatre), while acknowledging Mitchell’s complex relationship with its legacy. Ophelias Zimmer provides an alternative to Hamlet interpretations that are notorious at major British playhouses—respectful to the text and supported by a male star actor in the title role. However, like Five Truths , it might be equally seen as a counterpoint to a specific directorial interpretation—in this case, one of the most internationally renowned examples of Regietheater in the twenty-first century, that is

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Thomas Ostermeier’s Hamlet, which premiered at the Schaubühne in 2008 and has toured globally for many years afterwards. Featherstone indeed suggested that Ostermeier’s version directly inspired Mitchell and Lamford to work on Ophelias Zimmer, and that they decided to turn their own Schaubühne adaptation into ‘a sort of a feminist antidote to Hamlet ’ (qtd. in Kelting 2015). Ostermeier’s production became famous for Lars Eidinger’s expressive performance and his uncontrollable rants directed at the audience. It is thus striking that when Jenny Köning performs the eponymous heroine in Ophelias Zimmer, her restrained acting is in stark contrast to Eidinger’s exaggerated stage behaviour. At the same time, her detailed and intense performance in Mitchell’s version might be juxtaposed to her portrayal of Ophelia and Gertrude in Ostermeier’s Hamlet, where she replaced Judith Rosmair, enacting the two Shakespearean heroines as quickly sketched, almost stereotypical figures. Mitchell’s decision to adapt Hamlet coincided with a distinct point in her career, when she gained artistic and institutional freedom to experiment with one of the most popular plays in Western drama on her own terms. In 2016, in conversation with Robert Icke, Mitchell noted that ‘as a senior female artist now’ she feels ‘accountable for the feminist agenda’ (2016: 00:15.15–00.15.24). Similarly, Cornford and Svich argue that ‘Mitchell’s intense focus on the treatment and representation of women has been a clear feature of her work since the start of her career, but it was not until recently her over-riding theme’ (2020: 142). Celebrated both in the UK and Continental Europe, the director has eventually established her own team of long-term collaborators, which has enabled her to make more radical and risky choices, often in the framework of co-productions. As a co-production between Schaubühne Berlin and London’s Royal Court, Ophelias Zimmer draws on the prestige and resources of two prominent playhouses in major European capitals. German theatre funding in particular is well known for providing artists with security and stability largely unknown to many British theatre makers. Schaubühne has afforded Mitchell longer rehearsal times and more continuity in terms of her artistic collaborations than British institutions, as she has often noted in interviews with scholars and journalists. Moreover, staging Hamlet with German actors and for German audiences, the director was able to adapt the source more liberally, since approaches to Shakespeare on the Continent tend to be less tied to the text than in the UK, where Shakespeare’s plays have a semi-sacred status and where theatre tends to be at the service of the playwright

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rather than a director. At the same time, even though Ophelias Zimmer had a limited stage presence in the UK—it ran in London for only five days—it still relied on Royal Court’s ethos of support for new writing. It has also benefitted from the growing awareness and appreciation of Regietheater and Continental Shakespeare interpretations amongst British audiences, which is evidenced by the popularity of such artists as Ostermeier, Ivo van Hove, and Krzysztof Warlikowski, whose productions can be often seen on London stages. Given that in this male-dominated generation of European theatre makers Mitchell is a rare example of a highly successful female director, it is hardly surprising that her work is likely to be discussed through the prism of her gender and feminist agenda.

Mitchell’s Feminist Agenda Ophelias Zimmer exemplifies Mitchell’s strategy of directing classical plays and operas with an aim to expose their reliance on patriarchal narratives and power structures. Cornford describes this strategy as ‘both willful and distracting insofar as it has drawn focus away from what audiences expect to see’ (2017: 84). He further clarifies that Mitchell ‘uses distraction willfully to expose operations and abuses of power, and to redirect the audience’s attention to characters and experiences that are commonly overlooked’ (Cornford 2017: 87). Cornford and Svich define this approach as deconstructive (2020: 142), with Cornford introducing the term ‘dialectical thinking’ to accentuate the contradictory character of Mitchell’s method (2017: 78). What I argue in the context of supplement as a strategy of deconstructive adaptation is that Mitchell’s shift of focus is purposefully paradoxical—it seems to look away from the male-dominated world of Hamlet, but it ultimately reveals more fully its patriarchal violence. Putting Ophelia in the foreground promises to fill a significant gap in the text and to offer some sort of justice to a marginalised, misrepresented, and misunderstood character. And yet, Mitchell consciously avoids this possibility. Her adaptation does not give direct insight or agency to the eponymous heroine. Instead, Ophelia is shown as a victim of Shakespeare’s scenario and male characters in the play. She is trapped in trivial and meaningless actions, while the grand tragic plot is taking place in the background. As Fowler aptly articulates Birch’s playwriting strategy, she ‘was more interested in the realist bracket she placed around Shakespeare’s action—the backstage before and after of Ophelia’s five Hamlet scenes’ (2021: 204). Still, the audience watching

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the play can reconstruct the heroine’s full story and its larger context by drawing on their knowledge of Shakespeare’s tragedy. What is clear to the spectators from the beginning is what Catherine Love fittingly describes as ‘a brutal inexorability’ of Ophelias Zimmer, which ‘plods, slowly, deliberately and relentlessly, towards its inevitable conclusion’ (2016). An analogy with Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, in which secondary characters struggle to establish their agency, while they are moving towards inevitable death, is evident, and it has not escaped the critics’ attention. Nevertheless, despite the legacy of Stoppard’s play and the tradition of other deconstructive adaptations, there was still an expectation that Mitchell’s decision to focus on Ophelia would give the heroine more agency. The director’s feminist agenda might have further suggested that the production would offer the spectators a strong and liberated female character. When Ophelias Zimmer was in rehearsals, Sarah Hemming enthusiastically announced that ‘[o]ne of Shakespeare’s most enigmatic characters is set to return in a new play that makes her the primary focus’ (2015). The critic’s anticipation of feminist reclamation is revealing, and since it represents a dominant trend in adaptation discourse (one which deconstruction seeks to resist), I will discuss it in more detail, reviewing a selection of views from different commentators. Hemming describes Ophelia as ‘one of the iconic figures of world drama,’ yet also one who ‘barely ventures an opinion throughout the whole of Hamlet and when she does, she is mad,’ and who ‘[u]nlike all the other major characters in Shakespeare’s tragedy […] even dies offstage’ (2015). Kelting offers a similar observation when she notes, ‘It becomes clear how little time the character gets on the main stage, how often she is spoken for or about, and how much time she spends there, alone in her room. So what is she doing? And how does she die?’ (2015). Finally, Featherstone shows how Ophelia’s lack of agency and depth in the play demonstrates a larger patriarchal perspective that affects the two female protagonists in Hamlet, since Ophelia’s victimisation in the play is complemented by Gertrude’s vilification—‘they literally are the baddie and the victim’ (Featherstone qtd. in Kelting 2015). All the three commentaries emphasise Ophelia’s limited scope for activity and the impossibility of her having any impact on the dramatic action. However, what is most conspicuous in Hemming’s account of the

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source play is not so much the link between Ophelia’s reduced appearance and her passivity, as between her marginalisation and mistreatment. Hemming writes: So elusive and passive is she [Ophelia] that Helena Bonham Carter, tackling the part in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1990 film, was shocked by just how little there was to go on. ‘Everyone abuses her,’ she said, in an interview. ‘Including, somewhat, the playwright. She’s so underwritten.’ British theatre director Katie Mitchell agrees. She read, back to back, the few scenes in which Ophelia appears. ‘If that had been a modern play, I suppose people would have thought it was quite an offensive piece of writing,’ she observes. ‘I’ve always been curious about the scenes we don’t see.’ Now Mitchell has come up with a remedy. (2015)

Ophelia’s limited stage presence in Shakespeare’s tragedy does not afford her many opportunities to assert herself, since the audience cannot see much of her actions and interactions with other characters. However, Bonham Carter’s and Mitchell’s remarks might suggest something far more disturbing about the heroine’s sketchy portrayal in Hamlet —an idea that Shakespeare’s marginalisation of Ophelia is a form of cultural abuse. In this context, it is not surprising that Hemming hopes that Ophelias Zimmer will function as ‘a remedy’ to what she perceives as Shakespeare’s both superficial and cruel treatment of a female character. It is clear, however, that Mitchell resists the temptation to see her production as a simple act of restitution. Her aim is not to improve Ophelia’s situation but to shift the perspective of the source tragedy in a way that will allow the audience to take a closer look at the heroine’s oppression. As the director explains: The premise of our play is this: what if we could see the whole of the action of Hamlet from the point of view of Ophelia’s bedroom? What would that do to our understanding of the play? And to our understanding of the character? (qtd. in Hemming 2015)

The strategy is consistent with her other directing projects, such as the staging of August Strindberg’s Fräulein Julie (Schaubühne Berlin, 2010) and Birch’s Anatomy of Suicide (Royal Court, 2010), which closely follow female characters and their actions. This direct focus becomes particularly explicit when Mitchell uses multiple cameras and large screens on stage for live filming, since cinematic tools allow the director to literally

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enlarge her characters and bring them closer to the audience. Indeed, Cornford and Svich note, ‘Mitchell’s camera has repeatedly zoomed in on oppressed and disregarded women and offered audiences close-ups of their facial muscles twitching with emotion, their tears wiped away, their shoulders raised and fingers clasped in tension’ (2020: 143). Although Ophelias Zimmer does not feature Mitchell’s typical cinematic set-up and does not include live video feed or pre-recorded video material, it achieves the effects of a camera close-up and replays through the combination of a minimalist script, design, costume, and stage action. As I have previously argued (Mancewicz 2014: 146–165), technology is not necessary to produce an effect of a digital medium, since mediatization can be evoked in the perception of the audience by an imaginative use of lighting, movement, stage design, etc. In Ophelias Zimmer, the effects of close-up and replay on stage are achieved through the application of simple and repetitive language, reduction of the space to a single, scarcely decorated room, and the presentation of recurring, mundane actions of the eponymous heroine. Through these means, Mitchell directs the audience attention to one character and her daily habits, guiding the gaze of the spectators similarly to what a camera might do. Moreover, the repetition of short phrases and actions allows the audience to experience an effect of video replay as part of live performance. Each time a particular sequence is enacted again, the audience is forced to follow it through as if they were re-watching a film, so that they might become subject to the numbing repetitiveness of Ophelia’s daily life. An example of such repetition is a sequence of actions centred around daily flower delivery. Every morning a maid (played by Iris Becher) brings flowers and leaves them in the room, while Ophelia is getting ready for a walk. Each time Ophelia sees them, she tersely observes ‘[f]lowers again,’ and when she is back in the room, she throws them into the dustbin. This sequence reveals a tightly structured pattern of Ophelia’s schedule, while providing the audience with a sense of predictability and even boredom. However, as the performance develops, we realise that this seemingly trivial sequence of actions has a deeply troubling undertone. The offstage voice of Ophelia’s dead mother (recorded by Jule Böwe) reveals that she was offered flowers every day, and that she sought to get rid of them, since she saw this gift as an unwelcome reminder of death:

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Mother: […] They bring flowers every day. They bring peonies and tulips and lilacs and lilies. I’ll push them under the door. You take them outside. Flowers are for dead things. (Birch 2015: 37)

Ophelia internalises her mother’s view, since she later echoes her words: ‘Flowers are for dead […]’ (2015: 51). The flowers signal the link between the mother and the daughter, but they also give an important insight into the heroine’s backstory. Indeed, developing extensive backstories defines Mitchell’s work with the actors, whom she encourages to acquire a full understanding of the circumstances and psychological profiles of their characters. In Ophelias Zimmer an important backstory concerns Ophelia’s mother, whose voice-over is regularly heard on stage. Aleks Sierz describes this story in some detail. He writes that the mother was confined because of her mental illness, which means that the girl grew up mostly without her, and as a young woman ‘she was taught to be self-effacing and unobtrusive’ (2016). The heroine’s upbringing was overseen by her father, whose obsession with her virginity led to her being locked up in ‘a […] puritanically bare and basic’ room (Sierz 2016). The mother’s story might be thus used to explain Ophelia’s confinement and her solitude, though Sierz also strongly indicates that ‘there’s something uncomfortably reactionary in the suggestion that Ophelia’s psychological misery is the fault of her mother, or that her family has some genetic flaw which sees depression passed down from one generation to another’ (2016). The mother’s backstory, however, can be also read in another way, as a crucial link between patriarchal oppression and mental illness, showing how depression might be caused by social and personal circumstances that tend to persist across generations. From this perspective, ‘Ophelia’s psychological misery’ is not necessarily ‘the fault of her mother,’ as Sierz proposes (2016), but it is rather caused by her father and other significant men in her life, who have isolated Ophelia and subjected her to psychological and physical abuse. Seen in this light, the flower delivery is one of many examples of such patriarchal abuse, given that it forces the heroine to confront what she perceives as mementos of her mortality and her mother’s mental illness on a daily basis. Ophelia’s stubborn rejection of the flowers might be then interpreted as a quiet though consistent protest against unwanted gifts, but also as a powerful affirmation of her will to live and to protect her sanity. Ophelia is equally obstinate in her denial of Polonius’s death.

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When she is asked to bring flowers to her father’s funeral, she adamantly refuses and throws them into the dustbin; she takes them only after she has been sedated and forced to attend the ceremony. Later, when she goes to see Gertrude, she decides herself to pick the flowers from the dustbin, as if to signal that she is ready to face her death. Indeed, in the play’s finale, when the water starts filling her room, she slits her throat. With this gesture, she challenges the narrative of drowning, borrowed from Shakespeare and described with scientific precision in a series of subtitles projected throughout the performance. A brutal and realistic portrayal of the suicide on stage is also important in terms of questioning broader cultural assumptions about Ophelia’s death. As Fowler argues, Mitchell’s production contests ‘the received cultural images of Ophelia’s aestheticised death, both in art and in Shakespeare, that feed a masculinist fascination with women’s suffering and madness’ (2021: 206). Tragically, Ophelia’s act of fatally cutting herself is the only moment in the play when she is able to claim agency and change the source plot. Mitchell’s subtle rendition of Ophelia, as exemplified in the flower scenes, is typical of her ability to reveal fundamental aspects of a character through minute details, but it also illustrates the director’s obsessive interest in the patterns of human behaviour. Anna Harpin argues that Mitchell’s work ‘is routinely described as possessing a clinical quality’ (2020: 193), which means that her principal aim is to inspect and dissect human actions and emotions. When talking about her productions, the director herself frequently uses metaphors that imply an image of theatre as a laboratory. She draws on this image in conversation with Hemming, while she explains her interpretation of Ophelia: ‘We have kind of syringed her out and put her on a Petri dish to do a proper forensic examination’ (qtd. in Hemming 2015). The metaphor offers a remarkable insight into her method of working with Shakespeare’s text. In describing her staging as ‘a proper forensic examination,’ Mitchell implies that she is looking at Ophelia as a specimen rather than a person. This description finds its visual representation in the finale of the performance, when a glass container is lowered to enclose Ophelia’s bedroom. Elaine Aston suggests that the action serves to ‘display the dead Ophelia like an exhibit in a museum of natural history—or, more accurately, perhaps, a museum of cultural history that locks its female subjects into a violent, masculinist gaze’ (2016). Both Mitchell’s metaphor and Lamford’s design situate Ophelia as an object of scientific inquiry rather than human empathy. Indeed, in Ophelias Zimmer there is no consistent effort to connect the

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heroine with the audience. The character is always removed from the spectators, who are asked to survey and scrutinise her from a distance. As Sierz argues, ‘It is hard to either sympathise or empathise with this Ophelia. She is not only isolated from Elsinore society, but also from us the audience’ (2016). Such approach goes against the Romantic tradition, outlined in this book’s Introduction, which interpreted Shakespeare’s heroes as living people but also as embodiments of extraordinary ideas and emotions. Romantic performances and writings centred on the inner lives of the protagonists, predominantly male ones, to magnify their individual struggles and feelings. Hamlet in particular tended to be seen as a superbly sensitive and sophisticated hero, whose dilemmas were captured in complex soliloquies that addressed fundamental moral problems. Romantic writers and post-Romantic scholars, predominantly male, were eager to self-identify with this charismatic character, recognising in him a reflection of their own intellectual inclination and their troubled relationship with the world. In Ophelias Zimmer, by contrast, there is no attempt to invite the spectators to identify with the heroine by offering them a privileged insight into her mind. Instead, the title protagonist is reduced to clearly identifiable, repeatable, and readable displays of behaviour. Her portrayal depends on outward manifestations of her everyday existence, shown in miniature, action by action. Mitchell’s focus on Ophelia’s constrained behaviour diverges thus from Romantic portrayals of Hamlet’s unbridled passion. However, the difference between the two characters is not only a matter of the dramatist’s and the director’s approach, since it also emerges from a close reading of Shakespeare’s text. Birch indicates this in her comparison of the two lovers in the source tragedy: Shakespeare’s Hamlet is very loud and bombastic, and he takes up a lot of space and makes a lot of noise about his mental decline. And then you have this girl, relegated to offstage, and she is very quiet. And so, we tried to be quite faithful to that, while still making Ophelia the loudest part in the whole play. (qtd. in Montironi 2020: 134)

The contrast between Hamlet’s loudness and Ophelia’s quietness is explicit in this adaptation almost to the point of exaggeration. Playing audio recordings of the prince is a regular element of Ophelia’s schedule, while the protagonist himself at some point bursts into her bedroom, where he frantically dances to Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart.’

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Meanwhile, Ophelia patiently follows her daily routines, which consist of inaudible and unobtrusive activities, such as sewing and reading. As Mitchell explains in conversation with Hemming, these activities were chosen strictly in accordance with Shakespeare’s plot, ‘We’ve tried to be rigorous: we’ve only allowed the character to do what she says she does’ (qtd. in Hemming 2015). It is for this reason that ‘the action [of Ophelias Zimmer] has to move in relation to the play [Hamlet ]—so all her [Ophelia’s] exits and entrances have to be clear’ (Mitchell qtd. in Hemming 2015). Both Birch and Mitchell insist thus that their minimalist portrayal of Ophelia is an act of fidelity to the text rather than its transgression. It is remarkable that a similar sense of fidelity, which determines the actions of the protagonists, and in particular their exits and entrances, can be seen in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. It might not be a coincidence that both these adaptations originate in British language and culture, where the tradition of remaining faithful to the Bard is exceptionally strong. At the same time, each of these two versions takes its loyalty to Hamlet to extreme, exposing the absurdity of rigorously following the source. The tension between fidelity to the source and the characters’ freedom is crucial to the deconstructive nature of these adaptations. In Ophelias Zimmer, however, where the supressed character is female, the restrained nature of her agency becomes problematic from a feminist standpoint. A narrow focus on Ophelia’s perspective is at the centre of Mitchell’s interpretation of Hamlet, with other plotlines either subjected to it or cut out. Such perspective is typical of the director, who, as Dan Rebellato notes, frequently defines her approach to a text as a search for ‘the “idea structure” of a play’ (2010: 331). He describes this approach as a process of ‘uncover[ing]’ a crucial construction of the text, whose discovery will allow for removing those elements that are less relevant (2010: 331). Mitchell’s concept of the idea structure bears similarities to the Derridean blind spot—in both cases, the aim is to reveal a hidden feature or a structure of the text that will revise its conventional interpretation. Indeed, Rebellato acknowledges a deconstructive potential of Mitchell’s method, when he observes that ‘[w]hat the process does is bring the text, in some sense, into conflict with itself, a kind of theatrical deconstruction (even if the rehearsal reconstructs the text anew)’ (2010: 331). In the case of Ophelias Zimmer, the conflict which Birch and Mitchell create relies on the oppositions between action and inaction, loudness and silence, as well as feminist validation and deconstructive unsettling. These pairs of

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juxtapositions are fundamental both to the production and its reception. They will be discussed below in more detail to illustrate the working of deconstructive adaptation.

Action and Inaction The action in Ophelias Zimmer might be defined by three terms: minimal, repetitive, and inevitable. Shakespeare’s story is reduced to a small number of activities that take place in Ophelia’s bedroom. This creates a sense of stagnation and confinement, resulting in the impression of inactivity. In articulating the limitations of the setting and its stage set-up, Love is unsure if we should be talking about action or inaction in this adaptation; she describes the performance as ‘choreographed boredom. Tedium distilled’ (2016). Similarly, Maria Elisa Montironi notes that in this confined space, ‘nearly nothing happens through the whole show— not without some kind of frustration on the part of the audience’ (2020: 141). Even though Ophelia is not entirely passive, her activities are not exciting or varied enough to give the spectators a sense of plot development. The action in Ophelias Zimmer is minimal when compared to its source because, similarly to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, while relatively minor characters are shown in the foreground, the main Shakespearean plot is barely sketched in the background. The following scene is a good illustration of this tendency in Birch and Mitchell’s adaptation, so it will be quoted here as an extended excerpt: The MAID Enters. OPHELIA Am I expected? MAID The play, Ophelia. OPHELIA Do I really have to go? She dresses OPHELIA in even smarter, more formal, evening clothes. OPHELIA seems uncomfortable. Dress on, slippers off, heels on. Ophelia walks over to bed and curls up on bed. Maid switches light on and puts on makeup with Ophelia lying down. The Maid Picks up Boxes, Goes Towards the Door, Stops at Steps, Looks Back at Ophelia. MAID Ophelia. Ophelia gets up, exits, Maid follows. […] Time passes. [from 5.05 – 7.50pm.]

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[…] 7.50 OPHELIA enters. She looks exhausted. […] (2015: 40-41)

The passage illustrates in great detail how Ophelia is being prepared for attending a theatre performance, with close attention being paid to clothes and makeup, whereas the play itself and its reception are omitted from the script and the staging. Consequently, unless the audience supplies the information about the fateful performance of The Murder of Gonzago in Hamlet from their memory, the heroine’s experience of the show and the ensuing plot developments, such as Polonius’s murder and Hamlet’s departure, will seem to them unclear and incoherent. Such extensive focus on marginal events with the exclusion of major ones might confuse the spectators, disrupting their efforts to piece together the play’s action. It also shifts the plot’s emphasis, showing an alternative model of tragedy, one that does not accentuate political and public displays of conflict, but rather sheds light on quiet and methodical practices of female abuse within a patriarchal system. This shift of emphasis is the most visible in the scenes in which Ophelia is mistreated by male characters in the play. Some of those scenes are enacted explicitly on stage, for instance, her encounter with Hamlet, but many happen offstage, indicating that violence against women is often hidden. Those offstage incidents reinforce the impression that the action in Ophelias Zimmer is minimal, with Ophelia’s oppression being suggested rather than shown. A striking illustration of such minimalism is the heroine’s appearance after her conversation with Laertes and Polonius, with the actual meeting being conspicuously absent from Birch’s script and Mitchell’s production: OPHELIA comes back into the room, slowly. She looks a little dazed / ruffled as though she has been pushed around. She holds onto her arm. Touches her face. (2015: 15)

In those moments, in which repressive actions are reduced to offstage events, abuse is portrayed as something that is neither seen nor heard, either because its manifestations are systematically ignored, or because there are no witnesses. Ophelias Zimmer continuously balances between visibility and invisibility in its portrayal of Ophelia’s oppression, making it difficult for the audience to experience intimacy and empathy in relation

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to the eponymous character. Since the staging reveals only that which happens in the bedroom, there are significant gaps and blind spots in the heroine’s story. This creates a paradoxical situation, in which the audience seems to be given private and privileged access to Ophelia’s world, but ultimately gains only a partial insight. Finally, the action in Ophelias Zimmer is minimal because the heroine’s range of activity is strictly controlled and limited by male characters in the play. Ophelia does very little not because she is unimaginative and tedious, but because even simple and innocent pleasures can be denied to her at any moment. The following example illustrates this quite clearly: OPHELIA I’m going for a walk. MAID Your father says you’re to stay indoors. OPHELIA I want to walk. MAID Your father forbids it. OPHELIA I want to go outside. MAID Your father forbids it. OPHELIA My father forbids the outside? MAID Not today, Ophelia. (2015: 18)

Ophelia tries to oppose her father’s order, but her resistance is futile. It is evident that the heroine has little faith in her ability to contest patriarchal control, given her experience. Each time she seeks to assert herself against male dominance, she fails. It is thus not surprising that Ophelia resorts to indirect and symbolical models of defiance, such as the daily disposal of the flowers, which pushes the developments on stage into inaction. The perception of inaction is further reinforced by repeatability of the events. Featherstone remarks that Ophelia’s schedule is ‘incredibly repetitive, she’s just trapped in this room, and the biggest bursts of energy are when Hamlet comes in’ (qtd. in Kelting 2015). The dullness of the heroine’s daily existence provides thus an important contrast to the complexity of Hamlet’s world that is not shown on stage but that can be accessed through sound effects. At the same time, Sierz observes that the dramaturgy of repetition offers an insight into the heroine’s reality, since it ‘has the experiential effect of forcefully showing us the depressed and solitary state of Ophelia’s life’ (2016). However, Harpin sees this dramaturgy as problematic, in that it presents madness as ‘a round, […] sequential, and circular form, played out in gendered perpetuity,’ without

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any possibility of closure or change (2020: 200). Indeed, from the beginning of Mitchell’s production, we know that Ophelia is doomed to die. We know it either thanks to our familiarity with Shakespeare’s source, or thanks to the subtitles projected on stage that describe five stages of drowning. Analogously, Stoppard announces in the title of his play that Ros and Guil are bound to lose their lives by the end of the show. In both these adaptations, the inevitability of the characters’ destiny is inextricably linked to their inability to change their fate. All the three features of action in Ophelias Zimmer, namely, minimalism, repetitiveness, and inevitability reduce the heroine’s agency. Love argues that the production subjects Ophelia to ‘quiet, helpless misery, giving her no more agency than she has in Shakespeare’s telling’ (2016). The argument underscores the paradox of Mitchell’s approach, which does not resolve the problem of female submission that haunts Shakespeare’s tragedy. Harpin is even more harsh in her evaluation of the director’s treatment of women like Ophelia, claiming that they are shown ‘as the living dead who are asphyxiated in domestic rooms by patriarchal structures without any political agency to alter their circumstances, and are therefore rendered invisible’ (2020: 198). The contrast between the passivity of Ophelia and hyperactivity of Hamlet reveals fundamental difference between their experiences—both in the adaptation and its source. In Shakespeare’s tragedy, where the plot is much more developed, it is clear that Ophelia has no freedom to act, speak, and move, while Hamlet is able to roam freely until Act Four, when he is sent to England by Claudius. Undeniably, the prince is constantly watched and even spied on by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to whom he famously compares Denmark to prison (Shakespeare 2007: Appendix 1 F 2.2.238–267). As Critchley and Webster remark, ‘Elsinore is a world of spies, a world of utter political mistrust in a corrupt and murderous regime defined by the constant threat of war’ (2013: 37). However, as a man and a royal Hamlet enjoys greater autonomy and privilege than Ophelia, who is limited by her gender and social standing. At the same time, there are important analogies concerning the position of these two characters. Through their portrayal Shakespeare shows how young people at the court are intensely scrutinised by an older generation of powerful men. Polonius and Claudius not only employ others as spies, but they themselves eavesdrop on the lovers’ encounter, whereas Polonius secretly overhears Hamlet’s conversation with Gertrude. It seems that the extent of surveillance in the tragedy corresponds to the character’s importance,

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so that Hamlet is the most watched protagonist because of his rank and power. Claudius himself suggests this idea, when he warns that ‘[m]adness in great ones must not unwatch’d go’ (Shakespeare 2007: 3.1.187) and that Hamlet’s ‘liberty is full of threats to all’ (Shakespeare 2007: 4.1.14). Ophelias Zimmer reverses this pattern, since although the title heroine has limited agency, she is the most scrutinised character, being closely observed both by her maid and the audience throughout the performance. Aware of being watched and controlled, Ophelia strictly restrains her gestures and movements, which also leads to the conflict between action and inaction in this adaptation. Moreover, her restraint underlines the tension between loudness and silence.

Loudness and Silence The tension between loudness and silence in Ophelias Zimmer contributes further to the paradoxical nature of this supplement, given that Ophelia as the principal protagonist is predominantly not only inactive but also inaudible. Love indicates the irony of the situation in which ‘Ophelia might be moved to the centre of the narrative, […] but Mitchell pointedly does not offer her a voice within it’ (2016). The critic implies an interdependence between a literal and a metaphorical meaning of having a voice, showing how Ophelia’s formulaic and laconic language deprives her of the possibility to assert herself in both the private and the public discourse. Love argues that the heroine is ‘confined to a disturbing silence that speaks deafeningly of the misogynistic world of Shakespeare’s play’ (2016). The tension between loudness and silence, just like the one between action and inaction, illustrates patriarchal patterns of oppression that dominate in Ophelias Zimmer. To address these patterns, Mitchell, together with Birch and Lamford, has created what Fowler eloquently describes as ‘a performance language that intentionally diverged from the classical theatre’s logocentric traditions (and what these normally leave redundant)’ (2021: 241). Focusing on repeated gestures and silences, the three female artists have created an alternative to traditional components of drama, such as plot and dialogue. Both the script and the staging are explicit in establishing a clear, gendered division concerning loud and quiet characters. Women are reticent, while men are noisy. Ophelia and the maid are meticulously following their daily routines, with very few words exchanged between them. According to Montironi, Ophelia’s ‘long silences convey not only a

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sense of desperation, but also the awareness of the slow passing of time in her aimless life’ (2020: 141). It is clear from the beginning that the heroine’s taciturn behaviour does not necessarily result from her choice but from her circumstances. The opening subtitles, which describe the first stage of drowning, finish with a telling observation: ‘Victims rarely make any sounds; they are struggling just to breath[e]’ (2015: 1). Throughout the performance, the subtitles remind the audience that Ophelia feels suffocated in her environment, with the image of lacking in oxygen as a metaphorical representation of being denied basic liberties. The subtitles in Act One read that ‘[w]ithout Oxygen, the victim will lose consciousness’ (2015: 17), and indeed in Act Two the victim reaches the condition of ‘[u]nconsciousness,’ which means that ‘the body shuts itself down’ and ‘the victim will be motionless’ (2015: 37). This description might explain why Köning has chosen to portray Ophelia as extremely inactive and silent, with the process of drowning as a metaphor for systematic patriarchal oppression. In this context, the heroine finds understanding and encouragement only from her mother, who was victim of the same system: MOTHER Tiptoe Tiptoe. Reach. Reach. Can you reach it? Ssshhh. Breathe. Breathe. Try again. Tiptoe. Reach. Tiptoe. Reach. Have you got it? Sshhh. Breathe. Try again. Tiptoe. Reach. Reach, Ophelia. Ophelia. Ophelia. (2015: 28)

The mother’s voice poetically verbalises Ophelia’s experience and provides her with subtle guidance. With Ophelia having very little to say in this version, it is the mother who supplies the audience with an insight into her daughter’s feelings, suggesting that young women struggle to establish their voice, and that they might be heard only after they are dead. Similarly, we hear nothing from the heroine about her relationship with Hamlet, so we have to rely on her lover’s recordings to follow their tumultuous courtship. Hamlet is the most loquacious character in this adaptation, which is not surprising given that he is the one for whom Shakespeare wrote an impressively long part in his tragedy. Although Birch has cut out all of the prince’s soliloquies, his voice can be can heard throughout the performance either offstage or via recordings played by Ophelia. In some of these recordings, he declares his genuine affection for the heroine, but

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he can also be vulgar and violent, particularly when he is denied what he wants. At one point he can be heard shouting ‘FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU’ (2015: 27); later he invades Ophelia’s room, assaulting her with high-volume music. Birch’s description of this scene in the script is very effective, as it shows how Hamlet establishes his dominance over Ophelia through loud noise and large movement. Below is an extended excerpt of their encounter that reveals a full extent of Hamlet’s acoustic assault: [Hamlet] Puts the record in. Starts the track. It’s Joy Division - ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’. He stares at her. He takes his coat off. He dances. It’s big, he takes up a lot of space acting like a rock star. She can’t watch. She gets up to stop him. He pushes her back on the chair. She gets up again. He pushes her back on the chair. She gets up again. He pushes her back on the chair. She turns the record player off. He puts his coat back on. He picks up the player, leaves the Joy Division record. He throws the tape on to the floor and leaves the room. (2015: 32)

In this passage, the characters exchange no words, so that music and gestures become their means of communication—confirming Fowler’s observation about an alternative ‘performance language’ in this production. Hamlet’s aggression towards Ophelia is played out not only through violent actions, but also through high volume of the sound coming from the record player, which the girl eventually turns off. Her gesture is deeply symbolic in that it blocks not only this particular Hamlet, but also a long tradition of playing the character as a dominant and boisterous figure on stage. Such tradition is evident, for instance, in Ostermeier’s production, where Eidinger as Hamlet overshadows other actors with his flamboyant and chaotic behaviour. A successful musician and DJ, Eidinger was called by Marvin Carlson a ‘Rockstar’ of the Schaubühne (2009: 178), in recognition of his stage charisma and celebrated status within the ensemble. Birch’s description of Hamlet in Ophelias Zimmer as someone who ‘takes up a lot of space acting like a rock star’ might be an echo of Carlson’s observation and a reference to Eidinger’s performance. As a loud and forceful character, Hamlet represents the dominance and disorder of the patriarchal world. Montironi notes that ‘[a] plethora of other sounds can be heard from Ophelia’s room, suggesting the idea of people moving and living their lives while Ophelia is entrapped in her room, obliged (as the audience is) to listen to those sounds’ (2020: 142).

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For instance, when the heroine is denied the opportunity to be a guest at the wedding of Gertrude and Claudius, she can only watch Polonius and Laertes leave for the ceremony and then listen to the sounds that accompany it: the church bells, the fireworks, and the party celebrations. The night her father is murdered, she wakes up to the sound of gunshots and sirens. Unaware of what has happened until Hamlet drags the body of Polonius into her room, Ophelia is anxious and frightened. Montironi, who has closely examined the soundscape of Ophelias Zimmer argues that ‘[t]he effect of these sounds (resulting from friction, clashing and explosion) is much more than informative in that they are crucial in creating the main mood of the play: the feeling of captivity and of being entrapped and violated as well as the unpleasant idea of not being able to decode exactly what is happening around, which causes a sensation of being menaced and vulnerable’ (2020: 142). With a limited access to the world outside her room, the heroine mainly relies on sound to understand the events in Elsinore, but this process is additionally complicated by the nature of sound making in the play. In Ophelias Zimmer, as in many live cinema productions of Mitchell, the audience watches the foley process happening in a booth situated on stage. This means that what Ophelia hears is not a reflection of what the characters actually do, but what is being produced by foley artists. Such an approach underlines the performativity of sound creation in this performance, but it also underscores the possibility of control and manipulation. Max Pappenheim, the production’s sound designer, acknowledges this interpretation, when he explains, ‘we discovered early on the interesting possibility of the audience being conscious that the sound of Ophelia’s world is created/operated by men. Even her personal space is shaped by their actions. This adds a new, performative dramaturgical layer to the story’ (qtd. in Montironi 2020: 149). The comment indicates how the use of foley in the performance might signal patriarchal dominance, particularly since two out of three foley creators are men, but equally, it restrains the loudness of the male world. Aston suggests both readings, when she argues that ‘[t]he booth of sound-making men (sometimes joined by the maid) evokes the idea of patriarchal surveillance, but in tension with a metaphorical sensing of the desire to “lock” the controlling power out of Ophelia’s story’ (2016). She associates the process of sound production in the performance with male attempts to closely watch and control the heroine’s world, yet she also claims that this ‘controlling power’ is indirect and thus less harmful. Aston writes, ‘When that

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power breaks out of the booth to take centre stage as, for example, in a highly affective moment when Hamlet (Renato Schuch) enters to shake and shout at Ophelia, and dance to Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” then its destructive force is fully felt’ (2016). My argument is that although the scene is indeed highly dramatic and violent, it gives Ophelia an opportunity to act and assert herself. It is only when she is able to confront direct manifestations of the male world as opposed to remaining in oppressive silence or in confusing soundscape of foley sounds that she finds her purpose and strength. Another important source of power for Ophelia concerns her being in charge of Hamlet’s recordings—she is the one who decides what to play, pause, rewind, and repeat. Such possibilities for claiming control, however, are rare in Mitchell’s adaptation, and the overwhelming impression is that of futility and frustration. This leads to the third pair of oppositions that I propose to examine in the context of reading Ophelias Zimmer as a supplement, that is the tension between feminist validation and deconstructive unsettling.

Feminist Validation and Deconstructive Unsettling When Mitchell’s production was announced, it raised critics’ expectations concerning the portrayal of a strong female character; however, it quickly became clear that those expectations would not be met. Rather than portraying a defiant and articulate heroine who successfully wages war against patriarchy, Ophelias Zimmer shows systematic suppression of female agency and autonomy. Bemoaning Mitchell’s interpretation of Ophelia as a passive protagonist, Love asks rhetorically if the production can ‘really be thought of as a feminist re-framing of Hamlet ’ (2016), whereas Sierz observes emphatically, ‘It’s a curious kind of feminist reading that doesn’t in the least celebrate women, but instead represents them as total victims’ (2016). Their commentaries are echoed by Lyn Gardner who states, ‘Anyone expecting a feminist reclamation of Ophelia that allows her to take centre stage and remake and change her own story may be disappointed’ (2016). The critics’ frustration with this production is evident, as they were clearly hoping for a more optimistic message about a young girl who is able to successfully challenge patriarchy. In their portrayal of Ophelia and her environment, however, Mitchell, Birch, and Lamford insist on the impossibility of change, showing the system of oppression, in which women have strictly limited opportunities. The

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idea is implied by the mother, who draws a sharp difference between the possibilities offered to boys and girls: MOTHER You were supposed to be a boy I was going to have two little boys I was going to have two little blonde boys, one for each hand. Not a girl Not a little girl I can’t give or promise a single thing to Get smaller, Ophelia. Breathe in, Ophelia. Slip into the walls.’ (2015: 29)

With a hint of grief over the birth of a girl, the mother suggests that being a woman carries with it a sense of loss and limitation. Ophelia is doomed from the beginning not only by Shakespeare’s scenario, but also by a broader cultural script that determines her position in society. Mitchell, Birch, and Lamford demonstrate how the heroine’s world is becoming increasingly smaller and more restricted as she reaches adulthood, with her budding sexuality being rigidly scrutinised and controlled by men in her family and in the state. In this sense, Ophelias Zimmer is not an expansion of the source but its contraction. Given its principal idea, it promises to add to Shakespeare’s story, but instead it subtracts from it to distil only those elements that relate to Ophelia. Simultaneously, as a deconstructive supplement, it unsettles the source, revealing the capricious and confusing nature of Hamlet ’s patriarchal world. Mitchell, Birch, and Lamford do not explain Shakespeare’s plot, nor do they make it more accessible to the audience. Birch’s script and Mitchell’s staging challenge the Romantic and postRomantic tradition of interpreting the play as a tragedy of great passions and ideas—the tradition which focuses on male protagonists eloquently articulating their pain to the audience. Similarly, Lamford’s stage design, with its austerity and brutal realism, defies Romanticised views on Ophelia that have been made famous by John Everett Millais’s 1852 painting. Consequently, Ophelias Zimmer starkly differs from internationally renowned male-driven productions, as exemplified by Ostermeier’s Schaubühne version dominated by the energetic and loud Eidinger as Hamlet. Mitchell’s adaptation with its reduced action and a reticent heroine, proposes an alternative model of tragedy and theatre performance: one that looks inwards rather than outwards, one that is focused on carefully calibrated gestures rather than exquisitely expansive words, and one in which the action in a conventional sense is impossible, because the eponymous heroine is deprived of agency and autonomy. Ophelia in

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this version does not have the male privilege to choose if she wants to act or not act; instead, her aim is to be as inactive and inaudible as possible to survive.

Conclusion Mitchell’s feminist and deconstructive revision of Hamlet is subversive in its approach to the plot structure, the tragedy genre, and the tradition of staging this world-famous drama. Through dramatic and theatrical tensions, Ophelias Zimmer radically revises the source, while professing fidelity to Shakespeare’s text. By analogy, in Fortinbras Gets Drunk, Janusz Głowacki constructs the plot around paradoxes and contradictions that undermine the logic and coherence of dramatic action, with Fortinbras becoming an ironic supplement of Hamlet. The Polish dramatist deconstructs not only Shakespeare’s tragedy, but also the conventions of political thriller. He turns Fortinbras Gets Drunk into a witty subversion of both high and low genres, in which the audience might find an ironic portrayal of political struggles and historical processes in Central and Eastern Europe during communism.

References Aston, Elaine. 2016. ‘From Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own to Ophelias Zimmer (Royal Court).’ Drama Queens Review Blog. May 27. https://dramaqueensreview.com/2016/05/27/from-virginia-wolfsa-room-of-ones-own-to-ophelias-zimmer-royal-court/. Accessed 12 October 2020. Birch, Alice. 2015. Performance Score OZ . English: Unpublished. Carlson, Marvin. 2009. Theatre is More Beautiful Than War: German Stage Directing in the Late Twentieth Century. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Cornford, Tom. 2017. ‘Wilful Distraction: Katie Mitchell, Auterism and the Canon.’ In The Theatre of Katie Mitchell, edited by Benjamin Fowler, 72–92. Abingdon: Routledge. Cornford, Tom, and Caridad Svich. 2020. ‘Katie Mitchell’s Theatre.’ Contemporary Theatre Review. 30 (2): 137–150. Critchley, Simon, and Jamieson Webster. 2013. The Hamlet Doctrine. London and New York: Verso. Fowler, Benjamin. 2021. Katie Mitchell. Beautiful Illogical Acts. London and New York: Routledge.

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Gardner, Lyn. 2016. ‘Ophelias Zimmer Review – Katie Mitchell Brings Hamlet’s Real Ghost into Focus.’ The Guardian. 18 May. https://www.theguardian. com/stage/2016/may/18/ophelias-zimmer-review-katie-mitchell-hamletroyal-court. Accessed 12 October 2020. Harpin, Anna. 2020. ‘You Were an O. Your Black O in the Middle of Your Face’: Madness and Catastrophe in Katie Mitchell’s Ophelias Zimmer and Anatomy of a Suicide.’ Contemporary Theatre Review 30 (2): 193–210. Hemming, Sarah. 2015. ‘Ophelias Zimmer: a spin-off of Hamlet.’ Financial Times. 11 December. https://www.ft.com/content/3258fdf4-9a9c-11e5a5c1-ca5db4add713. Accessed 12 October 2020. Icke, Robert. 2016. ‘On Chekhov: Katie Mitchell and Robert Icke in Conversation, 17 March 2016.’ YouTube Video, 9 June 2016. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=FaeAgWMYu8w. Accessed 15 October 2020. Kelting, Lily. 2015. ’Ophelia Gets a Go: Vicky Featherstone.’ Exberliner. 14 December. https://www.exberliner.com/whats-on/stage/vicky-featherstoneophelia-zimmer/. Accessed 18 September 2020. Lease, Bryce. 2020. ‘Interview with Katie Mitchell.’ Contemporary Theatre Review. 30 (2): 253–259. Love, Catherine. 2016. ‘Ophelias Zimmer, Royal Court – Review.’ Blog, May 20. https://catherinelove.co.uk/2016/05/20/ophelias-zimmer-royalcourt/. Accessed 12 October 2020. Mancewicz, Aneta. 2014. Intermedial Shakespeares on European Stages. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Montironi, Maria Elisa. 2020. ‘The Soundscape of Ophelias Zimmer/Ophelia’s Room.’ Linguae & Rivista di lingue e culture moderne: 133–154. Ophelias Zimmer. 2016. Dir. Katie Mitchell. Royal Court Theatre, London. Live performance on 20 May. Rebellato, Dan. 2010. Katie Mitchell: Learning from Europe.’ In Contemporary European Theatre Directors, edited by Maria Delgado and Dan Rebellato, 317–338. Abingdon: Routledge. Sierz, Aleks. 2016. ‘Ophelias Zimmer, Royal Court.’ Blog. May 21. https://www.sierz.co.uk/reviews/ophelias-zimmer-royal-court/. Accessed 12 October 2020. Shakespeare, William. 2007. Hamlet. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. The Arden Shakespeare. Third Series. London: Thomson Learning.

CHAPTER 5

Fortinbras Gets Drunk, Janusz Głowacki

In Fortinbras Gets Drunk, Janusz Głowacki explicitly confronts the problems of politics and history, gradually building up the atmosphere of state supervision and oppression. His play unfolds in Norway and focuses on Fortinbras’s efforts to navigate a highly dangerous court, where espionage, treason, and assassination are routine methods of gaining and sustaining power. The events in Denmark serve as an important backdrop for the action, motivating the behaviour of Głowacki’s protagonists, but also providing contrast to their choices. Although the play relies on humour, its overall conclusion is deeply disconcerting, as it excludes any prospect of political and moral progress. The dramatist juxtaposes ethical idealism with political pragmatism to show the impossibility of overcoming tyranny—Hamlet fails dying for his principles, whereas Fortinbras survives only to rule without autonomy. The discussion of this adaptation draws on dramatic texts: the Polish script and the English translation, produced by Głowacki himself. The translation makes clear the dramatist’s desire to appeal to an American audience. While the Polish script is defined by cruel humour, the English one follows a slapstick convention, in the style of the play’s production at the Actors Studio in New York. The English version exaggerates the behaviour of the characters to increase the comic potential of the Polish play, and it features an additional scene, showing Hamlet in conversation with the ghost of his father. Furthermore, some cultural references © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Mancewicz, Hamlet after Deconstruction, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96806-9_5

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are specifically adapted for American spectators; for instance, the author replaces the image of a football game from the Polish text (2007a: 361) with ‘some tricks from American professional baseball’ (1990: 153). Since the style of the English text is more representative of nineteenth-century burlesques than twentieth-century deconstructive adaptations, I will focus on the form and context of the Polish script. However, to assist Anglophone readers, I will quote from the English translation, since it was authored by Głowacki, and it contains all of the Polish text. Furthermore, the translation is relatively well-established in the English language, because of its stage production in New York and publication in the Northwestern University Press. The differences between the two versions will be noted when necessary.

Hamlet in Communist Poland Fortinbras Gets Drunk was published in the Polish theatre magazine Dialog [Dialogue] in January 1990, and it was later reissued in the anthology of Głowacki’s plays, 5 i ½ dramatu [5 and ½ drama] (2007a). The idea for this adaptation, however, emerged earlier, at least in 1974, when in an ironic article ‘Obrona Poloniusza’ [The Defence of Polonius], a provocative praise of the Danish counsellor, Głowacki suggested that the ghost of king Hamlet was sent to Elsinore by the Norwegian politicians (2004: 184–185). A quotation from the essay serves as a motto to the play, setting the drama against the background of communist Poland in the 1970s and the 1980s. Głowacki often portrayed this period of political censorship and economic instability in his satirical writings; for instance, in the autobiography Z głowy [Off the Top of My Head] from 2004, or in the collection of essays Jak by´c kochanym [How to Be Loved] from 2005. These two decades were critical in that they established the basis for democratic transformations in Central and Eastern Europe. At the same time, the experience of the playwright in this period represents the destiny of many intellectuals in the region. Głowacki began to work on Fortinbras Gets Drunk in 1981, in Warsaw, shortly before the introduction of the martial law in Poland, and he completed it in 1983, in New York, where he settled as a political dissident (Głowacki 2007a: 23). Głowacki’s adaptation is shaped by his experience of living in a communist state. For him, Norway symbolises a superpower, such as the Soviet Union, whereas Denmark represents a small, repressed country, such as Poland (Głowacki 2007a: 23). The playwright underlines the themes of

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state surveillance and authoritarianism to establish links between his times and those of Shakespeare. As Peter Brook argues, Hamlet was exceptionally relevant for audiences in communist Poland, whose experience was characterised by political conflicts and artistic struggles that were reminiscent of Elizabethan England (1994: X-XI). Brook’s comments have supported a popular narrative according to which Polish post-war directors staged the tragedy of the Danish prince to portray political oppression that they were not allowed to articulate openly. For instance, Jan Kott famously describes Roman Zawistowski’s version of Hamlet in Cracow in 1956, a few weeks after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, as marked by the spirit of its turbulent times (1994: 48–52). The Congress was memorable for Nikita Khrushchev’s denouncement of Joseph Stalin and his personality cult, which established a new course for Soviet domestic and international politics. It was also right after the Congress that one of its prominent attendees, the Polish communist leader Bolesław Bierut, died in Moscov, allegedly of heart attack after reading Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ against Stalin. In this context of terror and fear, Zawistowski’s production not only emphasised political meanings inherent in the tragedy, but it also responded to current political issues. A similar sense of urgency defined Józef Gruda’s Hamlet in Szczecin in 1971. Shortly after the director began rehearsals in Szczecin, in autumn 1970, the city witnessed bloody workers’ strikes against the sudden inflation of food prices. Since at the time the local theatre building was being renovated, the actors rehearsed in the Pomeranian Dukes’ Castle, situated near the headquarters of the Polish United Workers’ Party and the Polish Soldier’s Square, where the clashes of the workers with the police took place. According to Zenon Butkiewicz, key images from the workers’ strikes in Szczecin and Pomerania were included in Gruda’s staging at the Castle to create an intimate link between the actors and the audience, while giving a contemporary currency to Shakespeare’s tragedy (2004: 212). Głowacki’s adaptation follows thus a well-established tradition of politically oriented interpretations of Hamlet in Poland, particularly in its attempt to foreground the themes of state oppression and surveillance. This is especially clear given that the play portrays a brutally repressive regime that might be identified with the Soviet Union. At the same time, however, Głowacki subtly subverts and enlarges the Polish tradition of Hamlet ’s political interpretations by parodying the

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conventions of political thriller—a highly popular genre with easily identifiable features. This makes Fortinbras Gets Drunk more universal and open to further processes of adaptation, situating the text in a chain of supplements. It also allows Głowacki to provide audiences with an alternative to serious, politically engaged versions of Hamlet that dominated in post-war Poland. Indeed, according to the author, when performed abroad, Fortinbras Gets Drunk has been successfully adapted to different political and cultural conditions, confirming that the characters and the scenes from the play might translate into a range of local contexts. For instance, Głowacki originally conceived the figure of the dead Norwegian king kept on the throne by ruthless advisers as a reference to Leonid Brezhnev, but in the besieged Sarajevo the character was interpreted as Slobodan Miloševi´c, whereas in Los Angeles as Ronald Reagan (Głowacki 2007a: 23). Inevitably, some of the scenes and dialogues had to be altered for foreign-language audiences when the play was performed abroad, which becomes evident when one compares Polish and English versions. What remains common for the two scripts, however, is consistent preoccupation with Fortinbras and his moral choices.

Fortinbras as a Supplement: Politics and Deconstruction By means of supplement as a strategy of adaptation, Głowacki expands the story of Fortinbras to critique Hamlet. His decision might be justified by striking similarities between the two characters in Shakespeare’s tragedy: both are deprived of fathers and kingdoms by their uncles and both embody the motif of a revenging son. These similarities, however, make it clear that the two princes make entirely different choices: while Hamlet adopts a philosophical approach, Fortinbras acts with force. Consequently, the latter secures for himself succession not only to the Norwegian but also to the Danish throne. The complementary situation of the two princes encourages the audience to compare their distinctive perspectives on revenge and morality. In introducing Fortinbras, Shakespeare emphasises qualities that are lacking in the Danish prince: determination, self-assurance, efficiency, and success. And yet Fortinbras’s limited stage presence makes him a minor figure in the play. Despite being mentioned several times in conversations of other characters (Shakespeare 2007: 1.1.94–103; 1.2.27–33; 2.2.60– 82; 4.4.8–29), he appears on stage only twice and then rather late, in

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Acts Four and Five. In the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in most theatrical and dramatic adaptations of Hamlet, the character was suppressed or even completely eliminated, since directors and playwrights tended to focus on Hamlet (Kowzan 1991: 54; Kobialka 1986: 196–197). As a result of his marginalisation, Fortinbras became a highly ambiguous protagonist, whose role in the play is open to a range of interpretations. It is hardly surprising that Kott asks in puzzlement, ‘Who is this young Norwegian prince?’ to argue that the decision about the interpretation of Fortinbras influences the reading of the whole tragedy (1994: 59). The return of Fortinbras in the twentieth-century theatre signals a clear transition from Romantic readings of the play that focused on psychology of the title hero to political interpretations influenced by specific political contexts (Kowzan 1991: 54). Such transition implies a significant shift from reflection to action, from idealism to pragmatism, and from tragic death to the establishment of a new order. Simultaneously, the revival of Fortinbras ensures the continuation of the tragic convention. In the nineteenth-century translations and adaptations in Continental Europe, Hamlet tended to finish happily, with the eponymous hero triumphantly rising to the Danish throne. When the tragic interpretation was restored, Fortinbras reappeared on the blood-washed stage in Act Five to overtake power in Denmark. Fortinbras’s rise to power not only gives Hamlet an ambiguous ending, but it also moves the play into the direction of politically oriented, deconstructive readings. As an outsider from Norway and a military leader with considerable ambition, Fortinbras sets the future of Denmark on an uncertain path. His arrival vindicates the tragic climax and extends it beyond the end of the play. Consequently, the rising popularity of Fortinbras in European culture coincides with a growing preoccupation with power and its paradoxes. Tadeusz Kowzan argues that the character gains primary importance in political interpretations of the tragedy (1991: 81). A case in point is the Polish reception of Hamlet. Fortinbras was excluded from the first Polish translation of the play, completed by Wojciech Bogusławski in 1797 and based on the German adaptation of August Wilhelm Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck; he was restored by Polish translators only half a century later (Kowzan 1991: 55). Nevertheless, it was only since 1905, when the playwright and artist Stanisław Wyspianski ´ published his influential study on Hamlet, which frames the tragedy as a commentary on current Polish affairs, that Fortinbras was recognised

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as a central figure in the play (Kowzan 1991: 55). Wyspianski ´ underlined the impact of the Norwegian prince on the design of the tragedy (2019: 81–82), inspiring Polish theatre directors and playwrights to turn their attention to this character. The experience of WWI and WWII, followed by several decades of the communist regime, made Polish audiences particularly sensitive to the issues of force and repression, which became symbolised by Fortinbras, who first invades Poland and then seizes Denmark. Post-war Polish directors often represented the Norwegian prince as a barbarian leader or a Nazi captain (Kowzan 1991: 57; Rosenberg 1992: 907), whereas playwrights like Głowacki and Jerzy ˙ Zurek (1981) portrayed him as a cynical leader who succumbs to the immorality of politics. In the post-war period, the popularity of Fortinbras increased not only in Poland, but also in other Central and Eastern European countries, where communism was introduced after WWII. For example, two eminent dramatists associated with the German Democratic Republic found Fortinbras crucial for their understanding of Hamlet: Bertolt Brecht considered him to be the negative model of the Danish prince, whereas Heiner Müller—Hamlet’s alter ego (Pfister 1998: 25– 26). Within a deconstructive model of adaptation, in which Fortinbras is a supplementary figure to Hamlet, both these interpretations are in necessary co-existence. Interpreted from the perspective of communist authoritarianism or perceived more universally as the one who ‘comes with conquest ’ (Rosenberg 1992: 907), Fortinbras became the symbol of modern anxieties, attracting widespread critical attention in the course of the troubled post-war period. In the twentieth century, the Norwegian prince was recognised as a key figure in the play by several critics, such as Harley Granville-Barker, Francis Fergusson, and Jean Paris (Kott 1994: 58; Kobialka 1986: 197). The growing importance of Fortinbras has foregrounded ambiguities surrounding this character. Shakespeare does not reveal much about the Norwegian prince, which encourages the audience to fill the gaps, but also to ask more questions. In this spirit of interrogation, the following analysis examines Głowacki’s Fortinbras as a figure supplementary to Hamlet and Fortinbras Gets Drunk as a supplement of Hamlet ’s action. I focus on the ways in which Shakespeare’s tragedy is transformed into political pastiche, but also on philosophical implications of this process. I argue that the Polish playwright does not merely update and contextualise his source by using a well-established strategy of a political reading,

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but that he profoundly challenges it by undermining the motivation of the protagonists and the morality of their actions.

Two Methods of Supplementation In his adaptation, Głowacki emphasises the Norwegian perspective to set the tone of his play as political. References to Norway in Hamlet are invariably connected with state affairs: setting the border between the neighbouring countries, the succession to the Danish and Norwegian thrones, and the invasion of Poland. In Fortinbras Gets Drunk, all these themes are extended and parodied, apart from a conspicuously absent reference to the war ‘against the Polack’ (Shakespeare 2007: 2.2.75). And yet the absence of this last reference makes it even more likely that the adaptation will be read as a caricature of communist Poland, particularly since Głowacki focuses on familiar examples of everyday surveillance and propaganda language. Parallels with Hamlet are present in Fortinbras Gets Drunk from the beginning. In the opening stage directions, the author insists that his story develops simultaneously to Shakespeare’s plot, ‘The action takes place in the court of the Norwegian King at the same time as the events in Shakespeare’s Hamlet ’ (Głowacki 1990: 133). In the English version of the play, the parallel perspective is shown explicitly on stage, since the first scene introduces the meeting of Hamlet with the ghost, during which the prince learns about the murder of his father. The ghost scene is quoted from Shakespeare’s tragedy, and it is the only instance when the source is directly cited in Głowacki’s drama. This clearly contrasts the anachronistic and poetic language of the Elizabethan tragedy with contemporary, often vulgar dialogues of Głowacki’s characters. More specifically, the solemn scene constitutes a stylistic counterpoint to the burlesque encounter between Fortinbras and the ghost of his father later in the play, during which the protagonists speak in coarse language and act rudely. By contrast, the Polish version opens with a conversation between Sternborg, the minister of internal affairs, and Eight Eyes, his assistant, who establish the link between Norway and Denmark—both geographically and politically. As the politicians outline the conflict between the two countries, they briefly introduce the background information which Shakespeare included in the first act of Hamlet: the poisoning of the old king, Hamlet’s hostility towards his uncle, his friendship with Horatio, and his suspicious behaviour. In contrast to the English translation, the

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Polish script relies mainly on the conventions of political thriller and less so on slapstick comedy. In both the English and the Polish versions, the events in Denmark are manipulated and monitored by the Norwegian politicians, Sternborg and Eight Eyes. They are responsible for sending a secret agent to Elsinore to poison the old king and another agent to present himself to Hamlet as the ghost of his father. The politicians hope to cause a severe rift between Hamlet and Claudius, so that they can overtake the throne of Denmark. The Norwegian network of agents includes such important Danish subjects as Polonius, characterised as cowardly and subservient, and Laertes, described by Eight Eyes as a ‘promising swordsman and a complete idiot’ (1990: 172). The Norwegians sponsor his fencing lessons to prepare him for the duel with Hamlet. In Głowacki’s drama, even Ophelia joins the secret police, having failed to become an actress. Foregrounding the Norwegian perspective, Głowacki applies two separate though closely interrelated methods of supplementation. On the one hand, the dramatist attributes the Norwegian influence to the events in Denmark, supplying Shakespeare’s plot with an external, political motivation. On the other hand, he models actions of his protagonists on those of Shakespeare’s characters, enlarging the tragic framework to include elements of political thriller, with its emphasis on conspiracy theories and manipulation. Both these methods allow Głowacki to magnify state-related issues in Hamlet and parody them without scruples. Consequently, his adaptation turns into a series of absurd and abominable occurrences, as the characters aim at attaining and maintaining power in a disarray of unstable alliances and unpredictable incidents. The two methods of supplementation converge in the conversations of the Norwegian guards, who exchange ironic comments in between important political events. The soldiers offer the audience an invaluable insight into the geo-political situation of Norway and Denmark, while they discuss current incidents. When they exchange the running gossip and speculate about the development of the situation in the country, the guards parody fundamental principles of political thriller, in particular its obsession with eavesdropping and conspiracy theories: GUARD ONE. [paranoia setting in] Do you think someone is listening to us? GUARD TWO. Who the fuck knows?

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GUARD ONE. That’s not good. I don’t like talking if no one’s listening. My thoughts get all confused. (1990: 139-140)

The overall effect of this conversation is deeply disturbing, since the guards reveal how closely the state controls every aspect of public and private life, distorting and poisoning relations between people. Foregrounding the theme of eavesdropping, Głowacki follows the strategy of Zawistowski’s 1956 adaptation of Hamlet. In this production, according to Kott, the crucial activities were watching and spying, while the overall atmosphere was that of anxiety, incertitude, and distrust in the aftermath of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1994: 48–50). In Fortinbras Gets Drunk, however, these themes are presented through comedy. Głowacki exaggerates the role of eavesdropping to such an extent that he creates parody of espionage. Simultaneously, the use of comedy establishes a striking similarity between Głowacki’s guards and Shakespeare’s gravediggers. Both pairs of characters offer a comic relief and ironic distance to the grim events and topics. The following excerpt provides a revealing example of the guards’ sarcastic attitude: GUARD ONE. You know what would be nice? Some food. GUARD TWO. [nostalgically] Yeah. GUARD ONE. I heard that there’s some coming from Finland. GUARD TWO. No. Really? GUARD ONE. Yes. As a reward for eliminating the sixteenth regiment… GUARD TWO. You mean the five thousand naked soldiers who demanded clothes so Sternborg was forced to bury them alive? GUARD ONE. Yeah. Those. GUARD TWO. Well, even if the Finns don’t bring us the food, the King did personally guarantee our children will get some food or if not them then their children or their children’s children or somebody. (1990: 152)

Analogously to Shakespeare’s gravediggers, who could lightly discourse on the matters of mortality (Shakespeare 2007: 5.1.1–60), the guards exhibit astonishing optimism when discussing famine and mass executions. Moreover, the guards not only supplement the action of Hamlet with important background information concerning political conflicts

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between Norway, Denmark, and Finland, but they themselves function as supplementary figures. Introduced as soldiers, they are modern equivalents of Marcellus and Bernardo, who in the opening scene of Shakespeare’s drama inquire about state affairs and prompt Horatio to describe the political situation in Denmark. The inclusion of the Norwegian guards at the beginning of Głowacki’s play establishes thus a strong correspondence with the plot structure of the source. At the same time, it is clear that when the guards comment on widespread hostility and political oppression, their hard-hearted attitude exposes military brutality in its most cruel and merciless form. The portrayal of the guards shows how a deconstructive supplement can simultaneously mirror and subtly subvert its source. To reinforce parallels with Hamlet throughout the play, Głowacki creates several analogies between his characters and those of Shakespeare. Thus, Sternborg and Eight Eyes resemble Claudius and Polonius, respectively, Fortinbras echoes Shakespeare’s Hamlet, while Hamlet bears some similarity to Shakespeare’s Fortinbras. Finally, Dagny, Sternborg’s niece, takes a role analogous to Ophelia. These parallels support Głowacki’s turn towards pastiche, particularly as they underline the contrast between the source and the adaptation in terms of the portrayal of characters. The protagonists in Fortinbras Gets Drunk are not tragic. Instead of exhibiting great human flaws, they display ludicrous defects of character, while they are driven by fear, ignorance, and compulsive desire of power. Constructed as Derridean supplements, they function in a paradoxical manner in that they both imitate Shakespeare’s source and interrogate it in the process of dialectical characterisation.

Dialectical Characterisation Głowacki is explicit about designing his characters dialectically: he defines them not only by their unique personality, but also by its negation. This dialectical design is clearly articulated by the ghost in his conversation with Fortinbras: […] Look at me, dialectically. Listen, in order to grasp who one is, one has to grasp who one isn’t, right? It seems as though what one is comes about only in opposition to what one isn’t. And vice versa, of course. […] (1990: 156)

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The ghost claims that the understanding of one’s own identity depends on the juxtaposition of terms. He takes this observation further, applying it to external phenomena, which leads him to declare that his immateriality as a ghost is the condition of the materiality of the world, with the two aspects of reality depending on each other (1990: 156). The argument, however, is not about asserting a binary system of definition in the style of Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralist theory, since Głowacki complicates it through a Derridean paradox. The ghost immediately describes himself as ‘a mass of contradictions’ (1990: 156), as he is both living and not living, and he feels hot and cold at the same time (1990: 156–157). Dialectics is thus essential not only for understanding one’s identity, but also for comprehending the world in general. It is also an important sign of the play’s reliance on a post-structuralist and postmodern paradigm. The notion of dialectics in Głowacki’s drama echoes Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s reflections from The Phenomenology of Mind, where the inherent relationship between the positive and the negative finds its theoretical formulation: […] in the case of conceptual thinking […] the negative aspect falls within the content itself, and is the positive substance of that content, as well as being its inherent character and moving principle as by being the entirety of what these are. Looked at as a result, it is determinate specific negation, the negative which is the outcome of this process, and consequently is a positive content as well. (2005: 118)

Hegel insists on the inclusion of the negative into the very content of a thing, and, consequently, its reversal into a positive value: Beauty, powerless and helpless, hates understanding, because the latter exacts from it what it cannot perform. But the life of mind is not one that shuns death, and keeps clear of destruction; it endures death and in death maintains its being. It only wins to its truth when it finds itself utterly torn asunder. It is this mighty power, not by being a positive which turns away from the negative, as when we say of anything it is nothing or it is false, and, being then done with it, pass off to something else: on the contrary, mind is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and dwelling with it. This dwelling beside it is the magic power that converts the negative into being. (2005: 93)

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The philosopher considers the negative to be a destructive force which might emerge in ‘the life of mind.’ Nevertheless, he claims that it might also transform its deadly nature into ‘being’ [das Sein] (Hegel 1952: 30). The negative is a ‘moving principle,’ as it enables the movement of the content [seine immanente Bewegung] (Hegel 1952: 49), forming a necessary condition of the dialectical process, since as John H. Smith puts it, ‘The passage through the negative is a necessary component of the Spirit’s movement’ (1987: 247). The advancement of the negative, however, proceeds in a circular manner, since Hegel’s system depends on ‘an essentially a-temporal, i.e. nonlinear structure whose point of departure is in essence (“an sich”) the same as its end’ (Smith 1987: 247). Ultimately, the negative and the positive converge into ‘a third term,’ which, according to Derrida, results in making the Hegelian process of dialectics both monolithic and prone to idealising and thus unable to contain the difference. Derrida’s notion of différance is an effort to overcome this limitation within Hegel’s system (1981: 43–44). Smith goes even further to argue that the desire to create ‘a form of alterity and difference’ is an aim of post-structuralism in general (1987: 243). In Fortinbras Gets Drunk, Hegelian dialectics is filtered through postmodern poetics by means of parody and the interplay of high and low genres. This is particularly clear when Głowacki introduces two Norwegian princes, Fortinbras and Mortinbras. They are juxtaposed as figures that symbolise contrastive models of life that philosophers have described as vita activa and vita contemplativa (for instance, Arendt 2018). This distinction becomes almost too obvious during their first and only encounter on stage, when Fortinbras takes off pieces of armour, while his brother is focused on writing a speech. The set-up suggests that the two brothers split between them the key characteristics of Hamlet, which A. C. Bradley identifies as those of a soldier and a philosopher (1986: 94–95). In Głowacki’s adaptation, however, these characteristics are distorted in accordance with the dominant spirit of parody. During the meeting, Fortinbras reveals disgraceful stories from his military career— when drunk, he burnt the wrong city and hung his horse. Mortinbras, on the other hand, demonstrates his ignorance and naivety—he composes a speech for Eight Eyes, without realising that it will be used to commemorate his own death. Given such explicit polarisation of the two characters, it is Hamlet who emerges as ‘a third term,’ a synthetic representation of the features exhibited by the brothers. The Danish prince is both a thinker and a soldier, even if his portrayal is also turned into parody.

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Sternborg and Eight Eyes ruthlessly ridicule Hamlet’s intellectual inclination, failing to understand the character’s passion for reading. Instead, they condemn him for being superstitious (1990: 135) and see him as someone who can be easily controlled (1990: 137). Hamlet is described in the secret reports not only as an insecure intellectual, but also as an indecisive soldier, whose involvement in the partisan movement against Claudius is inconsistent and inefficient (1990: 164–165). Consequently, Shakespeare’s tragic hero appears in Głowacki’s adaptation as a ludicrous and eccentric figure: EIGHT EYES. […] But I’ve got a very interesting transcript of a top secret conversation between Hamlet and Horatio… [Eight Eyes hands a sheet of paper to STERNBORG] STERNBORG. [reads ] ‘I do forget myself. I’m glad to see you well.’ … ‘ I saw him once.’ ‘Indeed, my lord.’ … ‘In my mind’s eye.’ But what is that supposed to mean? EIGHT EYES. Our man wasn’t in the best transcribing position. The ditch he was in was full of water and had an echo. (1990: 136)

This incoherent and incomplete report, presented without the crucial context from the source play, sounds like the combination of famous quotes in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. As in Tom Stoppard’s adaptation, these severely truncated speeches introduce an image of Hamlet as an ineffective and incomprehensible individual. It is the final conversation between Fortinbras and Hamlet, however, that gives Głowacki an ideal opportunity to juxtapose the two characters. In a revealing confrontation the madman faces the drunkard. They both justify their behaviour as necessary to preserve their lives in a hostile environment, but there is a fundamental difference between their choices. Following Michel Foucault and in line with structuralist dialectics, Małgorzata Sugiera argues that madness implies the existence of order, since insanity might be defined or dissimulated only against that which is perceived as sane and normal. Drunkenness, on the other hand, cannot be feigned; it also brings pure confusion and anarchy, indicating that the dramatic reality in Fortinbras Gets Drunk is devoid of discipline and order (1997: 40–41). The Norwegian prince confirms this, when he admits that one cannot pretend to be an alcoholic without becoming one (1990: 204). Moreover, just as madness and drunkenness

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introduce distinctive models of reality, they also indicate different goals of the protagonists. Feigning madness is a way of confronting corruption and hypocrisy at the court. As a madman, Shakespeare’s Hamlet may openly express his opinions, and he does so, for instance, in the conversation with Polonius (Shakespeare 2007: 2.2.317–358), or Ophelia and Gertrude (Shakespeare 2007: 3.2.105–147). In Głowacki’s play, drunkenness gives Fortinbras the possibility of escaping political involvement in the chaotic and frightening reality of the Norwegian court, yet it does not allow him to confront it. As the protagonist notes, ‘A drunkard is harmless. Nobody bothers with drunkards. Everybody trusts them’ (1990: 203). When Sternborg and Eight Eyes discuss state matters with Polonius, Fortinbras does not challenge them; instead, he avoids any involvement in the debate by drinking himself to oblivion. The juxtaposition of Fortinbras with Hamlet reveals a crucial difference between them. Almost until the end of the play, Fortinbras tries to escape his political destiny, yet eventually he sacrifices everything and everyone to gain power. This contrasts him with Hamlet, who refuses to compromise, so he decides to refrain from any action. As he delays the murder of Claudius and rejects offers of collaboration from the Norwegian politicians, he dismantles their carefully planned scenarios. This allows him to maintain his noble principles to the end, although when he dies, he leaves both Norway and Denmark in the bloody hands of Fortinbras, or rather Sternborg and Eight Eyes. The portrayal of Fortinbras and Hamlet in Głowacki’s play reflects thus an interpretation of Shakespeare’s tragedy that was dominant in communist Poland and that read it ‘as a play on the tragic nature of individual fate, chaotically caught and destroyed by 2005: 9). At the the crazy grindstones of history’ (Kujawinska-Courtney ´ same time, there are hints about Hamlet’s noble nature in this adaptation that echo the views of Romantic critics and that introduce the tone of unexpected seriousness in the context of parody and pastiche. These hints situate Hamlet’s depiction in Fortinbras Gets Drunk as an example of the Derridean différance, which unlike the Hegelian difference allows the protagonist to remain the conspicuous Other, who continues to stand apart from the rest of the play. Despite its conventional character, the note of heroism distinguishes Fortinbras Gets Drunk from earlier burlesque versions of Hamlet and awkwardly imposes itself on the play’s excessive and erratic action.

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Control and Chaos Głowacki’s treatment of action combines elements of control and chaos in a deconstructive marriage of oppositions. Despite numerous suggestions that Sternborg and Eight Eyes control the situation in both Norway and Denmark, events evolve in a disordered manner. This is because of the outrageous incompetence of the Norwegian agents, who, for instance, send a sympathy card to Gertrude a week before the death of her husband (1990: 172), but also because of general sense of randomness in the world of the play. Fortinbras becomes king even though Sternborg and Eight Eyes try to murder him, whereas Hamlet dies despite Fortinbras’s efforts to save him. The control apparatus is symbolised in this adaptation by the voiceover from the loudspeakers, which pronounces official announcements and issues instructions. Głowacki might have borrowed this idea from Ivo Brešan, a Croatian dramatist, who in his 1971 play Predstava Hamleta u selu Mrduša Donja [The Performance of Hamlet at the Village Endof-the-World down there; the title translation based on Kowzan 1989: 85] introduced a voice-over that transmitted political messages through the loudspeakers (2003). Głowacki must have been familiar with this adaptation, particularly since in 1974 Brešan’s play was turned into a film by a Croatian director Krsto Papi´c. The adaptation was so wellreceived in the Eastern Bloc that in 1985 a Polish director Olga Lipinska ´ produced a highly popular stage version with celebrated theatre actors for Teatr Telewizji [Television Theatre]. In Fortinbras Gets Drunk, the voice initially seems to be controlled by Sternborg and Eight Eyes. For instance, it orders Mortinbras and Fortinbras to arrive at the court, where they have been invited by the two politicians. Nevertheless, when the voice lists the king’s injuries after the explosion, Sternborg and Eight Eyes await the official statement with anxious anticipation. It becomes obvious that the voice represents the political apparatus which exists for its own sake, and so it cannot be fully controlled by anybody. Since the apparatus functions independently from the decisions of the protagonists, their attempts at influencing the situation at the court cannot be effective. As Sugiera notes about Fortinbras Gets Drunk, ‘All characters move here in an unknown direction of erratic trajectory of Brownian particles; no one controls anything, and it is equally difficult to predict one’s own deed as the deed of the other’ (1997: 39). While the actions performed by the characters are highly random, their endeavours are doomed to be

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futile—even if Fortinbras achieves the desired goal and becomes king, it happens only accidentally rather than thanks to his own efforts. The development of action in Fortinbras Gets Drunk is not only accidental, but also, from a moral perspective, arbitrary. Given that the political situation is constantly changing, the characters are ready to form alliances with anyone who might prove helpful, regardless of their beliefs and sympathies. Thus Eight Eyes cooperates with Sternborg, who has killed his father and brother; Mortinbras supports Sternborg, while openly declaring disgust of him, whereas Fortinbras allies with Eight Eyes, who was involved in murdering the king and Mortinbras. Indifferent to ethical principles, the protagonists fight for survival. Even Hamlet, a noble protector of the Danish people, shows political shrewdness: he delays revenge because he suspects his father of intriguing against him. As the plot develops in this accidental and arbitrary manner, with the protagonists forming random and temporary alliances, the audience witnesses neither absolute fairness nor open injustice on stage. These categories cease to exist in the dramatic reality created by Głowacki. And yet ultimately, randomness is only one possible interpretation, since from a different perspective, the events are tightly controlled, not by Sternborg and Eight Eyes, but by Shakespeare’s script. Fortinbras Gets Drunk, just like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and Ophelias Zimmer, is constrained by its source, which determines the destiny of the protagonists, regardless of their attempts to influence the action.

Conclusion Blurring the boundary between tragedy and its parody, Głowacki challenges genre conventions and critical interpretations attributed to Hamlet. Although to some extent the author places Shakespeare’s action in the context of contemporary culture, his supplement bears only formal resemblance to the nineteenth-century tradition of Hamlet burlesques, which demonstrated the currency of the Elizabethan tragedy within changing political systems, cultural codes, and stylistic conventions. In accordance with the burlesque genre, throughout Głowacki’s play the characters enact serious and dignified events from the source plot in a comic manner: in bawdy and coarse fashion they engage in violence, excessive drinking, and moral corruption. Nevertheless, there are important signals in Głowacki’s drama that suggest that the playwright goes

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beyond the burlesque tradition, revising Hamlet in a deconstructive manner. Głowacki does not simply turn Shakespeare’s tragedy upside down, writing a mock version of Hamlet’s story. Instead of presenting his readers with pure pastiche of the Elizabethan plot and language, he offers them a serious take on the source, which is typical of postmodern rewritings. In Fortinbras Gets Drunk, caricatured occurrences from Hamlet have tragic consequences. The farcical, fake ghost sent by the Norwegians in the end does manage to create chaos and destruction in the Danish kingdom. At the same time, solemn events suddenly acquire burlesque dimension, as in the commentaries of the two guards, who accept the inhuman practices of Sternborg and Eight Eyes with utter indifference and mockery. Głowacki deprives Shakespeare’s scenario of its grandeur and order. In the tragic genre, events gradually proceed from calm to calamity, only to culminate in the inevitable execution of poetic justice. ‘Tragedy explains death, making it part of a coherent pattern which one rarely perceives in actuality, and Hamlet’s death, if undeserved, proceeds in a satisfying way out of a hard-won self-knowledge’ (Jenkins 1990: 60). In Hamlet, the bloody finale restores order in Elsinore, since the deaths of the protagonists occur as an inevitable outcome of their actions. In Fortinbras Gets Drunk, the ending is not truly tragic, and it is explicitly deprived of moral justification. Although the title protagonist survives to become king and declare the process of non-violent transformations in the country, the final appearance of Sternborg and Eight Eyes disrupts the righteous, morally uplifting conclusion of the play. The last scene suggests that the newly elected monarch and his advisers will continue state oppression despite appearances of justice. Głowacki repeats Shakespeare’s finale with a twist, which emphasises a crucial difference between the adaptation and its source. This pessimistic ending shows that Głowacki deconstructs the tragedy not only as a genre, but also as a set of moral values. In Fortinbras Gets Drunk, ethical principles do not govern public and private life; instead, they are replaced by totalitarian rules. Such perspective reflects more appropriately the experience of post-war audiences in Central and Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain. The actions of Sternborg and Eight Eyes take to the extreme the political intrigues pursued in Hamlet by Claudius and Polonius, hinting at the brutality of Shakespeare’s drama.

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Even though Fortinbras Gets Drunk is set in a vastly different convention of political parody, the adaptation reveals darkness at the heart of its source.

References Arendt, Hannah. 2018. The Human Condition. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Bradley, Andrew Cecil. 1986. Shakespearean Tragedy. New York: Fawcett Premier. Brešan, Ivo. 2003. Predstava Hamleta u selu Mrduša Donja. Zagreb: ABC naklada. Brook, Peter. 1994. ‘Preface.’ In Shakespeare our Contemporary by Jan Kott. Translated by Bolesław Taborski, IX–XI. London: Routledge. Butkiewicz, Zenon. 2004. Festiwal w czasach PRL-u. O Festiwalu Teatrów Polski Północnej w Toruniu (1959–1989). Torun: ´ Zapolex. Derrida, Jacques. 1981. ‘Positions: Interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine, and Guy Scarpetta.’ In Positions, by Jacques Derrida, translated by Alan Bass, 37– 96. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Głowacki, Janusz. 1990. Fortinbras Gets Drunk. In Hunting Cockroaches and Other Plays, by Janusz Głowacki, translated by Janusz Głowacki, 131–216. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ´ Głowacki, Janusz. 2004. Z głowy. Warszawa: Swiat Ksi˛azki. ˙ ´ Głowacki, Janusz. 2005. Jak by´c kochanym. Warszawa: Swiat Ksi˛azki. ˙ Głowacki, Janusz. 2007a. ‘Fortynbras si˛e upił.’ In 5 i ½ dramatu, by Janusz ´ Głowacki, 338–419. Warszawa: Swiat Ksi˛azki. ˙ ´ Głowacki, Janusz. 2007b. ‘Sci˛agawka.’ In 5 i ½ dramatu, by Janusz Głowacki, ´ 22–25. Warszawa: Swiat Ksi˛azki. ˙ Hegel, Georg Wilhelm, and Friedrich. 1952. Phänomenologie des Geistes. Hamburg: Verlag von Felix Meiner. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 2005. The Phenomenology of Mind. Translated by J. B. Baillie. New York: Cosimo Classic. Jenkins, Anthony. 1990. ‘Death in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: II.’ In Critical Essays on Tom Stoppard, edited by Anthony Jenkins, 50–62. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co. Kobialka, Michal. 1986. ‘“After Hamlet”: Two Perspectives.’ Theatre Journal 38 (2 Con(Text)), (May): 196–205. Kott, Jan. 1994. Shakespeare our Contemporary. Translated by Bolesław Taborski. London: Routledge. Kowzan, Tadeusz. 1989. ‘Hamlet’s Theme as a Macrosign’. Assaph. Studies in the Theatre. Section C 5: 83–90.

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Kowzan, Tadeusz. 1991. Hamlet ou le Miroir du Monde. Paris: Editions Universitaires. Kujawinska-Courtney, ´ Krystyna. 2005. ‘Shakespeare in Poland.’ Internet Shakespeare Editions, University of Victoria. 1–15. http://internetshakespeare.uvic. ca/Library/Criticism/shakespearein/poland1.html. Accessed 15 September 2019. Pfister, Manfred. 1998. ‘Polish and German Hamlets in Dialogue.’ In Hamlet East-West, edited by Marta Gibinska ´ and Jerzy Limon, 16–31. Gdansk: ´ Theatrum Gedanense Foundation. Rosenberg, Marvin. 1992. The Masks of Hamlet. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Shakespeare, William. 2007. Hamlet. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. The Arden Shakespeare. Third Series. London: Thomson Learning. Smith, John H. 1987. ‘U-Topian Hegel: Dialectic and Its Other in Poststructuralism.’ The German Quarterly 60 (2) (Spring): 237–261. Sugiera, Małgorzata. 1997. Wariacje szekspirowskie w powojennym dramacie europejskim. Kraków: Universitas. Wyspianski, ´ Stanisław. 2019. The Hamlet Study and The Death of Ophelia. Translated by Barbara Bogoczek and Tony Howard. London: Shakespeare’s Globe. ˙ Zurek, Jerzy. 1981. Po Hamlecie. Dialog 4 (April): 5–32.

PART II

Différance: Machines and Mixed Realities

CHAPTER 6

Différance

In a heated argument with his mother, Hamlet juxtaposes the image of his father with that of his uncle: Look here upon this picture, and on this, The counterfeit presentment of two brothers: […] for madness would not err Nor sense to ecstasy was ne’er so thrilled But it reserved some quantity of choice To serve in such a difference. What devil was’t That thus hath cozened you at hoodman-blind? Eyes without feeling, feeling without sight, Ears without hands or eyes, smelling sans all, Or but a sickly part of one true sense Could not so mope. (Shakespeare 2007: 3.4.51–52, 71–79)

The comparison of the two images prompts Hamlet to identify fundamental dissimilarities between the two brothers, two husbands, two fathers, and two kings. The prince refuses to accept the substitution of old Hamlet with Claudius, and he insists on their difference. He blames the mother for blurring the distinction between two men of incomparable character, reproaching her for losing control over her senses. He describes her as a creature ‘without feeling,’ ‘without sight,’ ‘without hands or eyes,’ ‘sans all.’ The imagery might suggest that Hamlet is © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Mancewicz, Hamlet after Deconstruction, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96806-9_6

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accusing Gertrude of going against her human nature, particularly since he links the disconnection of her body parts from her senses with the irrationality of her behaviour and judgement. He believes that she is devoid of human feeling and reasoning, and that she has lost the capacity to understand human beings and values that they represent. Driven by her libido and sexual gratification, according to Hamlet, she has turned into an animal. The implied analogy between Gertrude and an animal is reinforced at the end of this conversation, when Hamlet introduces an image of an ape. Insisting on his own sanity and pleading with the mother not to disclose his state to Claudius, the prince warns her about the consequences of her indiscretion. To illustrate the danger, he narrates a bizarre fable about an ape, which breaks its neck when trying to imitate the flight of birds (Shakespeare 2007: 3.4.190–194). Hamlet’s association of Gertrude with an ape seems inappropriate (Edwards qtd. in Shakespeare 2007: 352n) and illogical (Daniell qtd. in Shakespeare 2007: 352n), yet in the context of the whole scene, the fable fits with Hamlet’s criticism towards his mother. The fatal desire of an animal to pass beyond the limits of its species bears similarities with Gertrude’s loss of her human sensibility and rationality. The tragic end of the queen further confirms this parallel, since her death might be perceived as a punishment for her transgression. The analogy with an ape includes Gertrude in the category of anthropophorous animals, which according to Giorgio Agamben are ‘figures of an animal in human form’ (2002: 37). Those creatures allowed the ancients to distinguish between the man and the animal as part of ‘the anthropological machine,’ that is the production of differences between human and non-human creatures through reworking the concepts of inclusion and exclusion (Agamben 2002: 37– 38). When Gertrude abandons rational judgement and fully embraces animal instincts, she erases the difference between herself and non-human beings, disabling the anthropological machine. Given her status as the queen and the mother of the future king, her transformation constitutes an act of political transgression, which has fundamental consequences for the state. This part of the book looks at the difference through the lens of différance as a philosophical and political idea but also as a dramaturgical tool for producing multiple meanings and scenarios that remain possible. Gertrude’s portrayal in Shakespeare’s tragedy is emblematic here in terms of setting a path towards a deconstructive adaptation. From Hamlet’s

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perspective, with her swift replacement of husbands, she defies clearcut distinctions between humans, and with her preference for passion over reason she challenges the boundary between humans and animals. Gertrude’s behaviour, however, is not merely disruptive, since it invites different possibilities of transformation for her and the state. Similarly, in deconstructive adaptations, the production of differences is likely to result in several options emerging from creative play. What I argue here is that in such adaptations, the difference is achieved in the process of différance, in which images and scenarios are produced in abundance and without finally resolving into a coherent structure. I examine the process of différance as a strategy of adaptation drawing on approaches to Hamlet in Heiner Müller’s The Hamletmachine and CREW’s Hamlet’s Lunacy. Différance defines the relationship of these works with Shakespeare’s tragedy as a source and determines their imagery. It is also inscribed in the adaptations’ political agenda. Müller’s deconstructive approach is an experiment in dramatic form, driven by the playwright’s bitter criticism towards the European history and his attempt to instigate a revolution from within. CREW’s production is a ground-breaking mixed reality performance, which seeks to combine elements of live and digital theatre. It addresses an epochal shift from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance as a metaphor for contemporary concerns and anxieties. As radical revisions of Hamlet, both these versions explore the potential of excess and disruption as strategies for adaptation—strategies that might be neatly conceptualised through the process of différance.

Différance Différance is marked by distrust towards fixed categories and hierarchies, but also by playful productivity. Jacques Derrida introduces this term in his reassessment of Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics and in critique of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology (1973). He develops it further in ‘Différance’ (1982) and in Positions (1981). Since this ‘neographism’ is homophonous with the French word différence, the change of the vowel from ‘e’ to ‘a’ can be perceived only in written form (Derrida 1982: 3). In consequence, similarly to other deconstructive tools discussed in this book, that is supplement and trace, the term challenges the privileged position of speech over writing (Derrida 1982: 3). At the same time, différance demonstrates how meaning is possible, both in speech and writing.

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Introducing différance Derrida famously attempts to merge two denotations of the French verb différer, which in English correspond to separate lexical items: ‘to differ’ as well as ‘to defer’ (Derrida 1982: 7). Différance implies that meaning results from an opposition between elements (difference)—which is in accordance with de Saussure’s theories—yet it also suggests that meaning is never present, but is forever postponed (deferred)—which marks Derrida’s departure from structuralist linguistics. While différance describes the very possibility of meaning, the term itself has a unique significance. According to Derrida, it is ‘no longer simply a concept, but rather the possibility of conceptuality, of a conceptual process and system in general’ (1982: 11). It defies the unique relationship between the signifier and the signified. As a signifier, the term is a neographism, homophonous with another word (différence); as a signified, it encompasses several meanings: difference, deferral, and the combination of passivity and activity marked by the ending ‘-ance’ (Derrida 1982: 9). Due to its complex nature, différance is central to deconstructive philosophy and criticism. Applied to describe relations between fundamental philosophical concepts in Western tradition, it suggests that difference and deferral are based on ‘the economy of the same’ (Derrida 1982: 17). By means of différance Derrida brings under the categories of difference and sameness a number of basic philosophical oppositions. These categories might give rise to various interpretations when deconstruction is applied in dramatic and theatrical analysis. As Gary Waller observes in a pioneering anthology on Shakespeare and deconstruction, ‘What Shakespeare criticism must face, if it is to take deconstruction seriously, is not only the Shakespearean text’s production of meaning from the cultural matrix of Elizabethan England but the infinite variety of readings and predictions throughout its history’ (1991: 40). The artists examined in this part of the book are keenly aware of the importance of the tradition of ‘readings and predictions’ in Shakespeare’s reception, and through the principle of différance they deconstruct both Hamlet and the history of its interpretations. Several readings of Shakespeare’s tragedy have functioned on the basis of difference understood as juxtaposition. Critics have identified a number of oppositions within the drama, concerning the characters, their moral values, the themes, and dramatic styles. Stanisław Wyspianski ´ in his 1905 study of Hamlet argued, for instance, that because of Shakespeare’s textual revisions and personal experiences, the tragedy fundamentally

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depends on the contrast between the conventions of the old theatre and the new theatre as well as the conflict between two Hamlets—one who trusts the ghost and the other who doubts him (2019: 20–29). His interpretation assumed a profound rift underlying the structure of the play. Other scholars have compared different editions of Hamlet and juxtaposed the tragedy with its Ur-texts, later adaptations, Shakespeare’s other plays, and plays of other authors. The proliferation of critical studies has produced contrastive approaches to the text, which, in turn, has resulted in diverse and often contradictory interpretations. These varied critical approaches to Hamlet have not only contributed to its iconic status, but they have also become part of the cultural lens from which we view the play. Margaret Litvin has persuasively captured this idea with reference to multiple cultural traditions underlying the understanding of Hamlet in Arab culture, which she has labelled as the play’s ‘global kaleidoscope’ (2011: 2). Similarly, such perspectives as Romantic idealisation, psychoanalytical investigation, colonial and postcolonial revision, or popular culture appropriation—each of them embedded in their local and global contexts—have determined the image of Hamlet in Western culture. Charles Marowitz has noted that the play ‘is a living amalgam of influences as dissimilar as those of the Elizabethan and the Victorian, the Freudian and the Artaudian’ (1968: 14). Even though we are unlikely to grasp the sum of these diverse meanings and approaches while reading, watching, and contemplating Hamlet, they underlie its interpretative tradition, and as such they are available to critics, playwrights, and directors. From a deconstructive standpoint, these multiple critical and artistic perspectives on the tragedy contribute to its différance in that they offer different yet equally legitimate points of entry into the tragedy. Instead of providing an interpretative closure, they function on the basis of contrast and similarity, with some meanings inevitably deferred to allow for a particular view of the play. The two adaptations examined in this part explore the potential of différance while testing the boundaries of drama and theatre. The Hamletmachine remains one of the most radical examples of deconstructing Hamlet in European drama. In this play, deconstruction has three dimensions: philosophical, performative, and political. Philosophically, The Hamletmachine questions the nature of identities and differences. Performatively, it subverts the tradition of Hamlet ’s reception and establishes an experimental model of drama and theatre. Politically, it exposes a

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repetitive cycle of rulers and revolutions. What brings these three dimensions together is Müller’s innovative approach to adaptation that might be conceptualised in terms of Derridean différance, in which disparate images are accumulated to remain in productive tension. The Hamletmachine exhibits the process of différance in a raw and radical manner. Müller introduces in his drama associations from Shakespeare’s tragedy, post-war history, literary tradition, and popular culture. Some of these associations are put in the foreground, while others are deferred. His adaptation is part of a complex intellectual legacy of Hamlet ’s adaptations in Germany, which has been comprehensively and critically examined by Andreas Höfele in No Hamlets: German Shakespeare from Nietzsche to Carl Schmitt (2016). Unlike many other playwrights adapting Hamlet, however, Müller does not attempt at organising images from the source play and its cultural tradition into a coherent structure, not even within a single scene. Instead, he deconstructs Hamlet through différance as a machine for producing differences, which leads to a new mode of drama and a new type of experience for the readers and the spectators. The notion of the machine in this context is not purely thematic but structural, revealing how différance might work as a template for Hamlet ’s appropriation and for multifaceted uses of deconstruction in playwriting. Similarly, Hamlet’s Lunacy seeks to transform theatre practice, and it does so through the application of interactive and immersive technologies in performance. The production incorporates augmented reality and virtual reality in a live theatre setting, which makes it a striking example of a mixed reality show, when such forms of staging are still being developed and tested. Hamlet offers a good material for this exploration as a play that questions the characters’ perceptions of reality and that shows the ability of the theatre to challenge our understanding of the world. Furthermore, CREW has chosen Shakespeare’s script specifically to explore a major cultural and intellectual shift that occurred between the sixteenth and the seventeenth century and that undermined dominant views on religion, science, politics, and society. Différance is fundamental to a deconstructive interpretation of Hamlet in Hamlet’s Lunacy. It captures the production’s approach to the source, which focuses on the confrontation of the medieval paradigm with the Renaissance one during the playwright’s lifetime. Drawing on comprehensive research into astronomic, political, and cultural contexts of the seventeenth-century England, CREW has created an image of a cracked

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world, in which disparities between old and new ways of thinking are strongly present but remain unresolved. In staging différance as a confrontation of contrasting world views, the production shows how for Shakespeare and his contemporaries a number of longstanding certainties became debatable, while novel ideas and laws were not yet fully established. From this perspective, the epistemic shift portrayed in this production illuminates also present-day anxieties, such as the disillusionment with democracy and the growing awareness of the climate crisis. Hamlet’s Lunacy points to the insufficiency of current social and political models and the need for revolutionary modes of thinking and acting. In both works examined in this part of the book, différance is a strategy of adaptation as well as political investigation. The multiple images, ideas, and scenarios in The Hamletmachine and Hamlet’s Lunacy uncover different historical layers of Shakespeare’s tragedy, but they also hint at contemporary concerns and crises. Ultimately, différance in the two works results in an excess of possibilities, which in turn leads to the explosion of dramatic and theatrical forms. The following two chapters examine this process in more detail.

Conclusion Both Müller and CREW approach Hamlet as a litmus paper, testing how in a given cultural moment a classic text might help to chart the future of European theatre. In a non-linear, non-dialogical form, the German playwright explores multiple scenarios and images, establishing an early model of deconstructive drama on which the Belgian company draws four decades later in its mixed reality performance. At the same time, The Hamletmachine and Hamlet’s Lunacy approach their source from a historical perspective, excavating political and social contexts that have shaped Shakespeare’s tragedy to reflect on contemporary debates, conflicts, and struggles. As examples of différance in Shakespeare adaptation, the two selected works exhibit the strategies of doubling, multiplication, and excess. The Hamletmachine introduces the idea of mechanical production of meaning that might eventually explode the historical structures from within, whereas Hamlet’s Lunacy offers a vision of an epochal shift, with different ideas about the universe, monarchy, science, and revenge contrasting and complementing each other. Both the versions strive to unsettle their audiences, either by challenging their expectations about a dramatic structure

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or by altering their perception through the combination of real and virtual environments. Even though the two adaptations are inherently pessimistic and sceptical, they still show signs of hope that from the current chaos and confusion a new model of theatre and society might eventually emerge.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 2002. The Open. Man and Animal. Translated by Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1973. Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Translated by David B. Allison. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1981. Positions. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1982. ‘Différance.’ In Margins of Philosophy, by Jacques Derrida, translated by Alan Bass, 1–27. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Höfele, Andreas. 2016. No Hamlets: German Shakespeare from Nietzsche to Carl Schmitt. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Litvin, Margaret. 2011. Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Marowitz, Charles. 1968. ‘Introduction.’ In The Marowitz Hamlet. A Collage Version of Shakespeare’s Play, by Charles Marowitz, 11–50. London: Allen Lane. Shakespeare, William. 2007. Hamlet. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. The Arden Shakespeare. Third Series. London: Thomson Learning. Waller, Gary. 1991. ‘Decentering the Bard: The Dissemination of the Shakespearean Text.’ In Shakespeare and Deconstruction, edited by G. Douglas Atkins and David M. Bergeron, 21–45. New York: Peter Lang. Wyspianski, ´ Stanisław. 2019. The Hamlet Study and the Death of Ophelia. Translated by Barbara Bogoczek and Tony Howard. London: Shakespeare’s Globe.

CHAPTER 7

The Hamletmachine, Heiner Müller

The Hamletmachine is one of the most puzzling plays in Western canon. Composed as five short scenes, encompassing no more than a handful of pages, the text still challenges the expectations and sensibilities of the audience over forty years after its publication in 1977. The play is open-ended and highly ambiguous, leaving the readers with the task of establishing relationships between the characters and the speeches (such as the questions about who speaks, to whom, and to what purpose) and between the characters and the actions (including questions about who does what, does it actually happen, and what is the link between the events). As an adaptation of Hamlet, the text is a collage of scenes and citations from Shakespeare and others, with intertextual images and ideas complementing and contrasting each other with an explosive energy of différance. The following analysis focuses on The Hamletmachine as a playtext with some references to its staging history. I chose to quote from a more recent English translation of The Hamletmachine written by Dennis Redmond (Müller 2001a) rather than an earlier version by Carl Weber (Müller 1984). Having carefully compared these two translations with the German original (Müller 2001b), I find Redmond’s version to be more accurate and articulate. At the heart of Heiner Müller’s drama is an emphasis on difference as a key to the processes of adaptation and cultural transformation.

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The playwright saw the notion of difference as fundamental for understanding Shakespeare’s oeuvre and Hamlet in particular. In a speech at the Shakespeare festival in Weimar on 23 April 1988, entitled ‘Shakespeare a Difference,’ he insisted: Our task – or the rest will be statistics and a matter of computers – is the work at this difference. Hamlet, the failure, didn’t accomplish it, this is his crime. Prospero is the un-dead Hamlet: after all, he smashes his staff, a reply to Caliban’s, the new Shakespeare reader’s topical rebuke to all hitherto existing culture: YOU TAUGHT ME LANGUAGE AND MY PROFIT ON’T IS I KNOW HOW TO CURSE. (1990: 33)

‘[T]he work at this difference’ refers to the transformation of the existing culture through the creation of new meanings. The context of the speech suggests that it might be read more specifically as a process of establishing the distinctions between the past and the present in European politics. This separation is necessary if the European nations are to liberate themselves from history, which Müller in the same speech describes as a journey ‘through the hells of Enlightenment, through the bloody swamp of the ideologies’ (1990: 31). The task of differentiation, however, might be also interpreted in terms of Giorgio Agamben’s ‘anthropological machine,’ that is the establishment of differences between the man and the animal by applying the concepts of inclusion and exclusion (2002: 37–38). This hypothesis could be justified by drawing on Müller’s reference to Prospero and Caliban, who in The Tempest epitomise the juxtaposition between the human and the beast, as well as by emphasis on language, which, as Agamben points out, came to be seen as a defining feature of being human (2002: 34). According to Müller, however, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is incapable of producing the difference. Similarly to Shakespeare’s Gertrude, he has become lost in the maze of blurred categories and passionate gestures. Since his world has changed beyond recognition, and there are no clear ethical categories that he might question or challenge, he has no straightforward way of setting things right. Once the protagonist realises the extent of corruption in his family and in the state, he is forced to reassess all his previous beliefs and establish a new course of action. His reasoning, however, fails him, because reason cannot provide guidance when natural and moral rules are no longer valid. Unable to apply sound judgement,

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the protagonist no longer distinguishes between rational and irrational actions; on several occasions, he loses reason and gives himself away to uncontrolled passion or anger. In such state, the prince murders Polonius during the violent encounter with Gertrude in Act 3, scene 4. In The Hamletmachine, in turn, Müller abandons the effort to follow the reason altogether, and instead approaches the task of producing the difference in a systematic, machine-like manner by juxtaposing protagonists, events, and images to assemble an abundance of meanings. The profusion of references in The Hamletmachine blurs absolute boundaries between the compared entities, leading to contradiction and confusion. In a way, Müller, like Hamlet, fails ‘with this difference,’ when he strives to represent an experience which continues to escape him (Müller 1990: 31; 1994: 266–267). From a deconstructive perspective, however, this negative result is inevitable and in fact expected, since the language as such excludes the possibility of establishing clear and stable distinctions. In this chapter, I argue that in an adaptation guided by deconstructive principles of interrogation and self-reflexivity, the task of producing the difference necessarily takes the form of différance understood as an openended process. In Müller’s version, this process is also uniquely structured as machine-like production of meaning.

Machine Müller’s reliance on the machine image might have been inspired directly by Hamlet. In Shakespeare’s tragedy, Hamlet identifies himself with a machine in a letter to Ophelia. During the times of their courtship, the protagonist writes to her, ‘Thine evermore, most dear lady, whilst/ this machine is to him’ (Shakespeare 2007: 2.2.120–121). This concluding formula underscores the unity between his body as a machine and his soul/mind. It is one of Shakespeare’s subtle ironies that by the time Polonius reveals this correspondence to the royal couple, Hamlet’s relationship with Ophelia is irrevocably severed, whereas the protagonist no longer controls his own actions. The discord between the body as a machine and the mind as a controlling mechanism underlies, however, not only the turbulent relation between the two young lovers. It also echoes in the prince’s praise of a virtuous person as someone in whom ‘blood and judgement are so well co-meddled’ (2007: 3.2.65) that such an individual does not become ‘passion’s slave’ (2007: 3.2.68). Most importantly, the distinction between feeling and reason is crucial to the structure of

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Hamlet as a revenge tragedy, in which Shakespeare exposes the conflict between Hamlet’s desires and the duties arising from his position. The protagonist struggles not only with his own emotions but also with the external reality, which introduces into the play the sense of anxiety and apprehension. The use of the machine image in Hamlet is highly inventive in the context of early modern drama. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor in their Arden edition of the tragedy note that this is the only time that Shakespeare uses the word ‘machine’ and the first time that the Oxford English Dictionary records it with reference to a living human body (Shakespeare 2007: 246n). The metaphor of the body as a machine suggests a structure that consists of many parts—an image which reappears later in Hamlet’s description of a human being as a ‘piece of work’ that is ‘infinite in faculties’ (Shakespeare 2007: 2.2.269–270). The notion of the machine foregrounds also another important feature—that of each part having a distinctive purpose and working together towards a common purpose. In an analogous way, the body in the Renaissance culture functioned as a metaphor, where the idea of ‘the body politic’ symbolised the state in which each person or a group of people performed a distinctive role (Hale 1971; Dobski and Gish 2013). In Hamlet, Claudius provides an evocative example of the body politic when he explains to Laertes a symbiotic relationship between himself as the king and Polonius as his chief counsellor: ‘The head is not more native to the heart,/ The hand more instrumental to the mouth,/ Than is the throne of Denmark to thy father’ (Shakespeare 2007: 1.2.47–49). When Hamlet talks about the body as a machine, his metaphor might be influenced by the Renaissance political discourse, with both the source domain (machine) and the target domain (body) representing a framework in which separate parts are subject to the whole. Müller’s adaptation of Hamlet extends the rich figurative potential of the machine metaphor. The German playwright applies this concept to designate the pursuit of a specific though a highly symbolic task— the cultural and historical production of differences, which Stephen Barker aptly defines as ‘the technical work of meaning-making as the ground of culture-formation’ (2012: 401). The image of the machine appears already in the title of Müller’s play as an allusion to twentiethcentury radical experiments in the creative activity: Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Bachelor-Machine’ and Andy Warhol’s factory (Müller 1994: 295). Both these artists have reinterpreted the creation of art in terms of machine

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production, with all the consequences of this analogy for making artistic objects and evaluating them. Duchamp and Warhol have provocatively blurred the boundary between works of art and everyday objects, while encouraging the audience to approach art conceptually. In a broad sense, Müller’s affinity with Duchamp and Warhol consists in his revolutionary, iconoclastic attempt at revising mainstream forms of culture. More specifically, these three artists are similar in their efforts to challenge fundamental components and structures within their creative domains by evoking the notion of mechanistic production. They are also alike in their inevitable failure to completely liberate themselves from these forms. Finally, they have all greatly influenced subsequent generations of artists, transforming creative practices in the twentieth century and beyond. Duchamp and Warhol questioned the exceptional status of art and artistic creation, claiming that works of art could be conceived as everyday objects or could be produced from other everyday objects. Exhibited in art galleries, these objects would acquire the status of art, as when Duchamp placed a coatrack entitled Trébuchet [a trap] at the Bourgeois Art Gallery, New York or when Warhol showed the Brillo Boxes at the Stable Gallery, New York. These exhibitions invited the ordinary public and professional critics to reflect on the process in which an object becomes a work of art and on the role of the audience in that process. Analogously to art experiments of Duchamp and Warhol, in challenging the classic structure of drama, Müller gives a prominent role to the audience. The Hamletmachine retains some basic elements of a traditional stage text: it includes five scenes, monologues, dialogue, and stage directions. According to Arlene Akiko Teraoka, however, the German playwright deconstructs several fixed components of a five-act play associated with the bourgeois drama of the Enlightenment period, such as the consistency of action, the rationality of dialogue, as well as the independence and the integrity of the principal hero (1985: 81–121). All these elements are undermined in The Hamletmachine not only as features of a dramatic text, but also as rational instruments for comprehending the world. By challenging them, Müller questions several principles that organise our perception of reality, such as chronology, causality, and progress. He substitutes these notions with what might be described as a mechanic production of differences which inevitably dissolve into différance.

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The process of deconstruction in The Hamletmachine targets not only drama in general but also specifically Hamlet as a complex text with a rich history of reception. In his adaptation, Müller expresses a profound fascination with Shakespeare, which he developed over decades. The Hamletmachine results from the author’s obsession with Hamlet that began already in school and continued throughout his career (Müller 1990: 31; 1994: 266). The playwright started writing about this tragedy in the early fifties. Although the opening scene of The Hamletmachine was composed in the early sixties, Müller finished this play only after he had translated Hamlet for Benno Besson’s production at the East Berlin Volksbühne in 1977 (Weber 1980: 137). The translation sought to render Shakespeare’s tragedy in the context of Stalinism and real socialism (Fiorentino 2002: 79), and The Hamletmachine contains traces of the political situation in East Germany. The composition of the final version of The Hamletmachine consisted in assembling earlier reflections of the author and reducing the initial draft from two hundred to a mere eight pages (Müller qtd. in Weber 1980: 138). The final text comprises many quotations from Müller’s previous studies on Shakespeare’s tragedy, which makes it a central work in the author’s oeuvre (Kalb 1998: 104; Weber 1980: 137). It also includes allusions to other works of Shakespeare and references to the post-war European history. As the dramatist explains: there certainly is a cycle in my work, from my first play The Scab to Hamletmachine. I cannot start again in a total vacuum. I have to investigate and explore, to ‘turn over’ the old subject-matters, to see what they can yield from today’s vantage point. (Müller qtd. in Weber 1980: 138)

The comment suggests that Müller’s treatment of Hamlet resembles Warhol’s formula of artistic creation as a process of accumulating wellestablished images. Warhol’s statement, ‘I want to be a machine’ (qtd. in Bergin 1967: 362), which defines his automatic production of art, as well as his ironic distance to critics, is also echoed in The Hamletmachine. Müller produces his own version of Shakespeare’s tragedy from an assembly of quotations and images. Following the strategies of reduction, contradiction, and provocation, he constructs the play in a rigorous manner, yet the drama dissolves into the phenomenon of différance as an eclectic and open network of meanings. Although the linguistic signs in the play are coherently and intentionally structured, they are composed

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to ultimately evoke the sense of arbitrariness and absence. Words produce images, which do not resolve into coherent and structured meanings but rather engender other words and other images. Müller’s concept of a deconstructive meaning-making machine works in a symmetrical opposition to Agamben’s anthropological machine. The anthropological machine produces clear distinctions between the man and the animal to impose a particular model of politics and history. The deconstructive machine, by contrast, copiously manufactures images and sensations, without ever establishing the ultimate difference between them, to undermine the set structures of drama and history. The playwright accelerates the process of destruction by including several machines in his drama: Hamlet, Hamlet, Ophelia, and history itself are employed in the mechanical production of real and imagined scenarios. These machines do not produce any definite difference but rather function in terms of différance. They accumulate meanings with the aim of destroying dramatic and historical structures, which might bring the desired liberation from the recurrence of the same patterns.

Hamlet + Machine The Hamletmachine attempts to destabilise the dramatic structure of Hamlet, which makes it a prototypical case of a deconstructive adaptation—an exemplary machine of différance and disruption. German critics have recognised the nihilistic potential in the play, calling it a ‘non-drama’ rather than an ‘anti-drama’ (Sugiera 1997: 110). Analogously, in his later work, The Description of a Picture from 1986, Müller openly announces the act of destruction, ‘[t]he plot is arbitrary, since the consequences are past, the explosion of a memory in a died-out drama structure’ (Müller qtd. in Taubeneck 1991: 92). In The Hamletmachine, the plot of Hamlet is decomposed as a reminiscence of ‘a died-out’ structure of drama and history. In a letter to the editor of Theater der Zeit, Müller commented on the need for creating alternative methods of writing stories. The playwright’s argumentation sheds more light on his adaptation to Hamlet: I don’t believe that a story which has ‘hands and feet’, the fable in its classical definition, can grasp today’s reality anymore… The deficiency of yesteryear has turned into the advantage of today: The fragmentation of an event emphasizes its process-character, it prevents the production’s

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disappearance in the product which is simply marketed, and turns the presentation of the event into an experimental experience in which the audience can participate in a productive way. (qtd. in Weber 1980: 139)

Müller explains that his experimentation with plots results from the desire to portray his contemporary reality and to encourage the involvement of the audience in the reception and production of the play; such strategy is reminiscent of the Brechtian alienation effect. At the same time, his observations might refer to the construction of stories in a machinelike manner. The story which has no ‘hands and feet’ suggests a form which is neither human nor animal, but instead might develop through a mechanistic production of meanings. In The Hamletmachine, Müller approaches Shakespeare’s tragedy itself as a machine that enables the production of other texts. The source plot is reduced to a few prominent motifs, such as murder, betrayal, revenge, and desire, which are almost automatically repeated in most rewritings and performances of Hamlet as themes that are keenly awaited by the audience. The dialogues in Müller’s play are replaced by monologues, which does not allow the characters to establish any fulfilling, human relationships. The imagery of the drama depends on the accumulation of images, which because of their unexpected, estranging nature function similarly to surrealistic experiments in the manner of René Magritte and Salvador Dali. Adapting Hamlet ’s plot, Müller reduces, repeats, and distorts selected themes, which leads to disturbing effects. The Family Album, the first scene in Müller’s drama, does not invite the audience to share happy memories and positive feelings, as most family albums are intended to do. Instead, in this scene Müller deforms the relationships between Shakespeare’s characters, reducing their actions to loosely connected acts of extreme aggression, vulgarity, and mockery. At the burial of the father, Hamlet interrupts the funeral procession and breaks the coffin with his sword. He disperses the remains of the royal corpse to the crowd and helps Claudius take sexual advantage of the widow. The prince refuses to fulfil the scenario of revenge and proclaims his disillusionment with history to Horatio/Polonius. He imagines himself raping his mother and pleads with Ophelia to let him eat her heart. Müller himself described the Family Album as the ‘shrunk-head’ of Hamlet, claiming that the scene captures the essence of the tragedy:

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An epic, horizontal progression turns into a vertical one. All that is left of Shakespeare’s play went into this scene. The other scenes are variants, seen through different lenses, or through the same lens viewing a different subject matter…. (Müller qtd. in Weber 1980: 139–140)

References to Shakespeare’s tragedy in The Hamletmachine develop as ‘variants’ of the themes introduced in the Family Album. The repetition of motifs suggests the struggle to create a meaningful change, particularly since Müller does not involve his characters in consistent and purposeful actions. The only section in The Hamletmachine that resembles dramatic action and features the remnants of dialogue is Scherzo, yet, as Małgorzata Sugiera rightly points out, the scene extensively depends on pantomime and metaphor, whereas the exchange of a few words between Hamlet and Ophelia does not lead to proper interaction (1997: 95–96). The impossibility of communication between the characters demonstrates the failure of a dialogical form in the play. Showing the failure of dialogue in The Hamletmachine, Müller signals his deconstructive interpretation of Hamlet, as well as his critical attitude to contemporary history and politics. In ‘Shakespeare a Difference,’ the playwright explained that in relying on monologues, he followed the strategy of Shakespeare, who himself deprived Hamlet of proper dialogue partners (1990: 32). When working on his own version of the play, Müller did not substitute Shakespeare’s soliloquies with exchanges between the characters, claiming that the historical experience which he wanted to portray was not appropriate for that form: For instance, there was to be a scene in the graveyard where Horatio, having been killed by Hamlet, appears to him as an angel. They were having a long discussion on the situation of the world. But there wasn’t enough historical substance for such a dialogue; this then became separate monologues for Hamlet and Ophelia. The piece turned into a self-critique of the intellectual’s position. (qtd. in Weber 1980: 138)

The lack of ‘historical substance’ might refer to Müller’s criticism of socialist reality, which he describes as characterised by stagnation and impasse, and, thus, inadequate for dialogical structures (Müller 1994: 294). Simultaneously, the impossibility of dialogue contributes to the machine-like representation of Hamlet in Müller’s drama. Machines can be programmed to speak, but when The Hamletmachine was written,

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they had not been yet taught to engage with each other in a responsive manner, which is characteristic of human interactions. Since dialogues are virtually absent from The Hamletmachine, the play extensively relies on epic and lyrical constructions, in a move away from drama. Epic forms are the most visible in Hamlet’s monologues in the first and the fourth scenes of the play. Narrative passages, however, reveal the fantasies and the frustrations of the protagonist instead of describing his actions. In the Family Album, for instance, the protagonist seems to be addressing his mother, yet his words do not communicate with Gertrude, but rather express Hamlet’s incestuous desires: Now I tie your hands behind your back with the bridal train because I loathe your embrace. Now I tear apart the bridal gown. Now you must scream. Now I smear the rags of your dress into the earth which my father has become with the rags your face your belly your breasts. Now I take thee my mother in his, my father’s invisible trace. I strangle your cry with my lips. Do you recognize the fruit of your flesh now go, go to your wedding, whore, broad in the Danish sun shining on the living and the dead. (Müller 2001a: 2)

When Hamlet describes his violent intercourse with the mother, the text seems to exhibit a shocking departure from the source, yet, as Jonathan Kalb insightfully observes about the incestuous rape, ‘it is hypothetical, imaginary, a virtual rebellion carried out with mental puppets’ (1998: 112). In the context of Müller’s deconstructive machine, the excerpt could be interpreted as an automatic repetition of actions and gestures, which have lost their meaning a long time ago. In lyrical passages, on the other hand, Müller confronts the audience with elaborate imagery, which opens the play to diverse interpretations in the manner of différance, given that the produced meanings lead to confusion rather than closure. Such vivid, complex images may be noted, for instance, in the proclamation of Ophelia’s violence, in Hamlet’s reflections on his body, or in the description of ‘a Madonna with breast-cancer’ which ‘shines like a sun’ (2001a: 3). In the scene Pest in Buda Battle of Greenland, which features the metamorphosis of Hamlet into a machine, the protagonist declares that his ‘thoughts suck the blood of images’ (2001a: 5), which confirms the importance of visual language in the adaptation.

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Müller’s poetic imagery in The Hamletmachine follows his earlier observations on the dramatic idiom. In Tractor, a play from 1974, the dramatist argues for the creation of visual language that could exist beyond human communication: The need for a language, which noone can read, increases. Who is noone. A speech without words. Or the disappearance of the world into words. Instead of the lifelong compulsion to watch, the bombardment of the images (tree house woman). The eyelids blown away. The opposite out of the gnashing of teeth, fires and song. The garbage-pail of literature in the back. The dissolution of the world into images.

The language proposed by Müller is not only impersonal (‘Who is noone’), but also inhuman (‘which noone can read’). Confronting the audience with metaphorical imagery in The Hamletmachine, Müller either transfigures or rejects traditional forms of verbal expression, in accordance with a belief that it is no longer possible to offer choices to the audience, but that it is necessary to overload people with meanings (Müller 1986: 20). In The Hamletmachine, Müller produces images in a mechanical process of assembly and montage, which evokes the strategies applied by Magritte or Dali, who brought together disparate elements to explore subjective and symbolical states. His project also bears striking resemblance to Sergei Eisenstein’s application of the ‘montage of attractions’ (in both theatre and cinema) in which, according to Chiel Kattenbelt, ‘the different elements of the performance should, so to say, crash on each other, with the result that a new energy is released, which directly, that is to say, physically affects a shock experience’ (2008: 26). In The Hamletmachine, ‘a shock experience’ results from the juxtaposition of genres and registers. At the same time, Müller’s approach to adaptation is inherently deconstructive, since it exploits the ambiguous and playful nature of language to offer a unique dramaturgy of images that draws on contrastive and unexpected combinations of elements. The method becomes particularly evident, for instance, when in the stage directions the playwright introduces ‘[t]hree naked women: Marx Lenin Mao,’ who in their own languages simultaneously pronounce the sentence, ‘IT IS A QUESTION OF OVERTHROWING ALL SOCIAL RELATIONS, IN WHICH HUMAN BEINGS ARE’ (2001a: 7), quoted from the introduction to The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law by Karl Marx (2001a:

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9). The appearance of these nude male figures in a female form (however, they are to be represented on stage) is expected to have an unsettling effect on the audience. The sentence from Marx is also one of many examples in The Hamletmachine, where iconography is integrated into the text in the form of citations. According to Francesco Fiorentino, the quoted elements suggest the impasse of the political situation, in which everything is possible, yet nothing new is available, and one may communicate only through quotations (2002: 78). What remains are the deconstructive machines of Hamlet, Hamlet, Ophelia, and history.

Hamlet + Machine and Ophelia + Machine The identity of Hamlet as a machine is inherently linked to the mechanised image of Ophelia, particularly since the structure of The Hamletmachine implies a complementary relationship between these two characters. As Fiorentino argues, ‘Hamlet and Ophelia are, in Müller, two “machines of words,” two faces of the same “I” without an interface, of a subject which is such [as it is] only thanks to its dissociation, and may keep active only if its identity projections remain in a relationship which is marked by otherness and différence’ (2002: 88). From this perspective, Hamlet and Ophelia are not dramatic characters in a traditional sense but functional figures, each designed to perform a specific task in the play. Their identities do not depend on psychological realism, and their actions do not contribute to the development of a conventional plot. Instead, they operate similarly to machines that perform diverse and contrasting functions. Reciprocal in their relationship, Hamlet and Ophelia are inherently interconnected in a symmetrical structure of the play. Hamlet perceives himself in terms of negation, but also otherness, since already in the first scene he announces, ‘I was Hamlet’ (2001a: 1), and in the fourth one he ultimately disowns his name and destiny. Renouncing the role that he performed in Shakespeare’s tragedy, Müller’s Hamlet rejects the scenario of revenge in a declaration which is not just metatheatrical, since the character does not pronounce his disillusionment with Shakespeare’s script as a dramatic composition, but with ‘THIS AGE OF HOPE’ (2001a: 1), that is the post-war political and social reality of Europe. The negation of his former name and role leaves open the question of the protagonist’s new identity and offers him the possibility of rebellion, which could bring the desired difference. Having discarded his

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former Ich, the Müllerian Hamlet embraces other identities, which represent opposing ideologies. In a striking description of his contradictory positions, delivered by Hamlet-Actor, he becomes at once a rebel and an oppressor, a victim and a perpetrator, an anarchist and a police officer, a prisoner and an executioner, a hating subject and an object of hatred: My place, if my drama ever took place, would be at both sides of the front, between the fronts, over them. I stand in the sweating masses and throw stones at the police soldiers tanks bulletproof glass. I glance through the double-door outfitted with bulletproof glass at the oncoming crowd and smell the perspiration of my fear. I shake, choked with nausea, my fist against myself, standing behind the bulletproof glass. (2001a: 5–6)

Having created an alternative scenario, ‘if my drama ever took place,’ the protagonist pronounces his absolute empathy with the conflicting forces. However, his all-encompassing identification with the opposing sides might also suggest that he is simply unable to take a position in the battle—being overly intellectual, he cannot choose his allegiance (Sugiera 1997: 98). He describes his cerebral nature as a burden, ‘LIKE A HUNCHBACK I DRAG MY OVERBRAIN’ (2001a: 1), suggesting that his tendency to overthink hampers his movements and decisions. Similarly, Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster suggest that too much knowledge makes Shakespeare’s Hamlet unable to revenge his father, ‘Maybe action requires veils of illusion, and once those veils are lifted, we feel a sense of resignation’ (2013: 12). In The Hamletmachine, Hamlet the intellectual remains passive, while his new identity depends on accepting differences between the conflicting forces and the unresolved nature of his own position. Being ‘at both sides of the front,’ he finds himself ‘between the fronts, over them,’ and his hypothetical drama cannot be enacted. Disillusioned with the world, Hamlet wants to escape involvement in conflict and avoid any relationship which requires his emotional engagement: I don’t want to eat drink breathe love a woman a man a child an animal anymore. I don’t want to die anymore. I don’t want to kill anymore. (2001a: 6)

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The protagonist ultimately casts off all human experiences, be they base or sublime, positive or negative. Since his thoughts make him suffer, he wants to renounce his ability to think. In this transformation, he transgresses the borders of humanity, yet he does not follow his animal instincts either. Instead, Müller’s character desires to become a machine, ‘[a]rms to grasp legs to walk no pain no thoughts’ (2001a: 7). With his new mechanised identity, the protagonist wishes to forsake his human features and avoid involvement in politics. Disillusioned with history, Müller’s Hamlet chooses to establish the difference not through reasonable action but through destruction. His refusal to partake in historical events leads him to annihilate the very notions of time and action by means of aimless, automatic repetitions. Hamlet’s wish to turn into a machine in order to destroy time is also reflected in his desire to eat Ophelia’s heart. Since the heroine’s ‘heart is a clock’ (2001a: 3), she herself might be perceived as a machine, according to Roland Petersohn (1993: 89). Consuming the heart of Ophelia might allow Hamlet to acquire her machine-like qualities but also to disable the progress of time, or, more specifically, the repetition of failed scenarios of rebellion. A similar desire might be seen in Ophelia. Kalb argues that when she removes the clock from her breast, she does it as ‘a critique of time – time as a “frame” for reality, time seen teleologically as an agent of change and redemption that never arrive’ (1998: 114). The gesture of the heroine not only implies her rejection of the chronological and teleological framework of reality, but also situates her outside the realm of history. The metaphor of the machine brings together Hamlet and Ophelia in Müller’s drama. They represent corresponding though opposite features of the same subject, while being two separate individuals. Their juxtaposition is inscribed in the division of the play into scenes. Family Album (scene one) and Pest in Buda Battle of Greenland (scene four) are monologues of Hamlet, whereas The Europe of the Woman (scene two) and Wildstraining / In the Fearsome Armaments / Millenia (scene five) are monologues of Ophelia. The third scene, Scherzo, introduces a snippet of their conversation, the only example of dialogue in The Hamletmachine: OPHELIA Do you still want to eat my heart, Hamlet. Laughs. HAMLET Head in his hands: I want to be a woman. (2001a: 4)

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The arrangement of the scenes into intertwining monologues with an exchange of lines between the characters in the middle encourages the audience to compare Hamlet and Ophelia, assessing them against one another. Nevertheless, since their encounter is brief and inconclusive, it cannot bring any significant change to the development of the dramatic structure and the vision of history in The Hamletmachine. Hamlet and Ophelia might be interpreted as complementary characters—Ophelia functions as Hamlet’s reflection, whereas Hamlet is a mental construction of Ophelia. Their speeches do not have to be necessarily attributed to a single person, which implies the dissolution of a traditional notion of identity. In stage directions to the second scene, Müller suggests that the monologue of the heroine might be pronounced either by Ophelia, Hamlet, or Chorus. In a radio version of The Hamletmachine, written by the author himself, Hamlet’s words in the first scene were spoken by an actress performing Ophelia (Sugiera 1997: 97). Simultaneously, the two characters represent contrasting applications of the machine metaphor. Although both of them situate themselves outside time and history, they do so for different reasons. While Hamlet desires to become a machine to avoid killing others, Ophelia turns into a machine to execute cruel revenge. According to Kalb, when the modern prince refuses to take the role of an avenger, Müller does not fully abandon the tradition of Shakespeare’s hero, who is chiefly remembered for his hesitation and disbelief (1998: 111). On the other hand, contrary to Shakespeare’s heroine, who hurts herself, Müller’s Ophelia directs her aggression against others. Her brutality becomes particularly visible in the last scene. In her extreme violence, Ophelia imitates the cruelty of the history machine, yet she herself functions outside the historical paradigm. Her marginalisation is symbolised in the final image of the play, in which the heroine appears in the depths of the sea, sitting in a wheelchair while two men dressed as doctors wrap her in bandages (2001a: 8). Hamlet, by contrast, refuses to partake in bloody historical processes. He tries to stop the history machine by rejecting his own identity and humanity. The disparity between the functions of Ophelia and Hamlet as machines reflects the Janus face of history, which is both shockingly cruel and predictably repetitive. History itself is a machine of destruction, because, as Müller argues, the European past is based on the inevitable recurrence of the same scenarios of oppression, while the possibility of an ultimate difference is always deferred. Consequently, one may either strive to defy history, like Ophelia, or distance oneself from it, like Hamlet.

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Neither of these two strategies gives a promise of progress. As Höfele evocatively remarks, ‘History never stops ending. Hamlet never stops starting’ (2016: 292). Both are caught in a cycle, and when they collide, we learn something valuable about the nature of tragedy and human fate.

History + Machine The relationship between Hamlet and history underlines Müller’s notion of the history machine. For the playwright, Hamlet represents ‘the intellectual in conflict with history’ (Müller qtd. in Walsh 2001: 27), yet history perceived not as a positivistic progression towards ethical and technological advancement or as a movement towards synthesis in the spirit of Hegel’s dialectics, but rather as an accumulation of lost chances, the perpetuation of frustration and failure. As the dramatist describes his historical perspective: The Hamletmachine isn’t anymore simply a description of people missing the occasions and chances of history, the characteristic feature of the ‘German misery’ – as Brecht once called it. It is about the results of missed occasions, about history as a story of chances lost. That is more than plain disappointment, it is the description of the petrification of a hope, and consequently an effort to formulate a despair to distance myself from it. I cannot go on writing like this, I have to begin again, in some other way. This piece is truly a ‘period’ sign. (Müller qtd. in Weber 1980: 138)

The commentary underscores the sentiment of impossibility (‘missed occasions,’ ‘chances lost’) and stasis (‘petrification of hope’). The two ideas are closely related, since the stagnation of time is reflected in the mechanical repetition of defeats and the succession of tyrannical leaders. Müller’s reflections on historical processes echo in The Hamletmachine, where Hamlet declares with bitter disillusionment: The scenery is a monument. It portrays a man who made history, a hundred times life-size. The petrification of a hope. His name in interchangeable. The hope has not been fulfilled. (2001a: 5)

The speech is pronounced against the humming of a refrigerator and the flickering of television screens without sound. The objects suggest that history might be narrated as a steady stream of nonsense without any order or explanation. Simultaneously, history as a machine produces

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events which are so similar to each other that they have no exceptional features; the historical process is described as a mass-production of revolutions and rulers. The ‘interchangeable’ name of the hero might refer to Claudius and Joseph Stalin, particularly since the funeral of king Hamlet in the Family Album evokes the death of the Soviet leader (Fiorentino 2002: 81). In the fourth scene, Claudius and Stalin become new representatives of the old order, exposing the repetitive pattern of tyranny in European history. Reflecting on The Hamletmachine as ‘a “period” sign’ and on Hamlet as a model character, Müller identifies the most significant moments in the post-war history of East Germany, demonstrating how the initial enthusiasm of German intellectuals was inevitably frustrated over the course of time: Hamlet truly reflects the situation of the intellectual in German history, a situation which seemed to change after 1945, at least in East Germany. However, in 1956 – and for me even earlier in the fifties – it became evident that Hamlet was becoming a topical character again. Quite as Brecht once defined him: The man between the ages who knows that the old age is obsolete, yet the new age has barbarian features he simply cannot stomach. (Müller qtd. in Weber 1980: 137)

In the passage, Müller evokes two crucial dates in the history of the twentieth century—the end of WWII in 1945, associated with the hope of a new order in Europe, as well as the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, which exposed violence and terror inscribed in the post-war division into the Eastern and the Western Bloc. The dates juxtapose the end of the war with the military aggression, re-construction with demolition, freedom with repression, and hope with disillusionment. In The Hamletmachine, these contrasting historical references function as repetitions of failure and futility, along with the allusions to the uprising of 1953 in East Germany, and the battle of Greenland. The past and the present events reflect and repeat each other instead of representing chronological stages of the human progress: the battle of Greenland evokes political as well as ecological issues, whereas in the proclamation ‘Heil Coca Cola’ Müller ironically combines two ideologies of the twentieth century—Nazism and capitalism. Tyranny, exploitation, and enslavement take different forms, yet they are all products of the indifferent machine of history. The accumulation of unfulfilled hopes and

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failed revolutions in The Hamletmachine implies the notion of history as the perpetuation of injustice and cruelty (Sugiera 1997: 98). For Müller, this is the most terrifying vision emerging from Shakespeare’s oeuvre. ‘The horror that emanates from Shakespeare’s mirror images is the recurrence of the same,’ warns the playwright (Müller 1990: 33), as he adds his own version of Hamlet to the rich tradition of the play’s adaptations. In The Hamletmachine, ‘the recurrence of the same’ is conveyed by the image of the history machine, which continuously produces death and destruction. Müller’s notion of the history machine has found an iconic portrayal in Robert Wilson’s staging with students at New York University in 1986 (later that year the play was staged with acting students in Hamburg, and in 2017 it was performed with acting students from Rome in Spoleto). In Wilson’s production, all the characters and their actions were mechanised, with the actors repeating their gestures four times, moving each time a quarter of a turn. In Kalb’s interpretation, Wilson’s staging not only represented Hamlet’s desire of turning into a machine, but it also portrayed the impossibility of change, with events resulting in an impasse, with every action being perceived as redundant and futile (1998: 116). According to David Barnett, however, the repetitive nature of this production was also to encourage the audience ‘to detect the play of similarity and difference, and ask why certain variations occurred at certain times’ (2016: 51). Wilson’s staging and Barnett’s interpretation suggest the existence of fixed patterns in The Hamletmachine, but the play offers more than just repetition. Müller does not categorically deny the possibility of change within the framework of his adaptation. The playwright claims that the continuous repetition of images and words must necessarily destroy the structures of drama and history from within: The incursion of the times into the play constitutes myth. Myth is an aggregate, a machine, to which always new and different machines can be connected. It transports the energy until the growing velocity will explode the cultural field. (Müller 1990: 32)

In his adaptation, Müller connects Hamlet and Ophelia as cultural machines to the machines of Shakespeare’s tragedy and European history in the hope that the overkill of images will eventually lead to an act of cultural transformation.

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The Müllerian scenario of destruction resembles thus the Derridean description of deconstructive processes, which ‘do not destroy structures from the outside,’ but occur ‘necessarily from the inside, borrowing all the strategic and economic resources of subversion from the old structure, borrowing them structurally’ (Derrida 1976: 24). Müller’s play, which constitutes a dramatic chronicle of the twentieth-century European history and culture, seems to be written precisely as an attempt at creating a new ‘myth,’ ‘an aggregate’ that might contribute to disrupting from within the set structures of European drama as well as the bloody patterns of European history. Müller’s portrayal of history as a machine is thus radically different not only from Agamben’s anthropological machine, but also from the early modern body politic. Each of the three concepts is deployed to represent the nature of political order, and each relies on a metaphorical image of a framework that contains disparate parts. However, while the anthropological machine depends on exclusion and oppression, and the body politic foregrounds authority based on hierarchy and collaboration, the history machine highlights a process that involves accumulation and destruction. Müller’s image of a history machine emerges directly from his experience of political divisions and discords in post-war Germany and Europe. It records a particular point in history, but it equally shows the political potential of différance for adapting Hamlet.

Conclusions Différance plays multiple roles in The Hamletmachine. As a philosophical idea, it uncovers an intricate play of difference and deferral in the construction of identity and action. As a dramatic technique, it defines Müller’s radical approach to Hamlet and the tradition of its appropriations. As a political instrument, it reveals Müller’s distrust of cultural icons and his disapproval of European history, which he attempts to revolutionise from within. There are, nevertheless, several paradoxes in Müller’s project of deconstructing Hamlet, drama, and history. The play establishes a complicated relationship with its source, since, as Brian Walsh notes, it combines the radicalism of a dramatic experiment with respect for Shakespeare, which results in the tension between iconoclasm and idolatry (2001: 26). Müller’s complex attitude to Hamlet leads to further paradoxes. Although the playwright aims at overthrowing the supremacy of Hamlet

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as a literary and historical icon, he inevitably creates a new one, which Kalb labels as ‘the Hamlet Destroyer’ (1998: 109). Moreover, even though the dramatist attempts to write an anti-masterpiece, his work becomes a contemporary classic even before it is staged (Kalb 1998: 121). Simultaneously, as Müller seeks to disable the machines of Hamlet and history, his own adaptation functions as a machine that repeats the dramatic and historical scenarios that the playwright hopes to destroy. Müller’s paradoxical relationship with Hamlet positions The Hamletmachine as an example of a deconstructive adaptation that is governed by différance. The dramatic experiment relies on deconstructive machines employed by the playwright, which not only produce an excess of meaning but also infinitely defer the possibility of a coherent interpretation. These machines do not ultimately revolutionise the European politics, which continues to be shaped by national divisions and political crises, but they do succeed in refashioning Hamlet as well as post-war drama and theatre in the following decades. In some sense, CREW’s Hamlet’s Lunacy is a product of this refashioning, while it draws on historical traditions of theatre experimentation and applies them in a mixed reality performance.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 2002. The Open. Man and Animal. Translated by Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Barker, Stephen. 2012. ‘Hamlet the Difference Machine.’ Comparative Drama 46 (3): 401–423. Barnett, David. 2016. Heiner Müller’s The Hamletmachine. Oxon and New York: Routledge. Bergin, Paul. 1967. ‘Andy Warhol: The Artist as Machine.’ Art Journal 26 (4) (Summer): 359–363. Critchley, Simon, and Jamieson Webster. 2013. The Hamlet Doctrine. London and New York: Verso. Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Dobski, Bernard J., and Dustin Gish, eds. 2013. Shakespeare and the Body Politic. Lanham: Lexington Books. Fiorentino, Francesco. 2002. ‘Heiner Müller e la “Hamletmaschine”.’ In La Traduzione di Amleto nella cultura europea, edited by Maria Del Sapio Garbero, 77–107. Venezia: Marsilio.

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Hale, David. 1971. The Body Politic: A Political Metaphor in Renaissance English Literature. The Hague: Mouton. The Hamletmachine. 1986. Dir. Robert Wilson. Performance recording. New York Public Library. Performing Arts Research Collections—TOFT. Höfele, Andreas. 2016. No Hamlets: German Shakespeare from Nietzsche to Carl Schmitt. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kalb, Jonathan. 1998. The Theatre of Heiner Müller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kattenbelt, Chiel. 2008. ‘Intermediality in Theatre and Performance: Definitions, Perceptions and Medial Relationships.’ Cultura, Lenguaje y Representación / Culture, Language & Representation 6 (La Intermedialidad / Intermediality): 19–29. Müller, Heiner. 1984. Hamletmachine. In Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the Stage, by Heiner Müller, edited and translated by Carl Weber, 49–58. New York: Performing Arts Publications. Müller, Heiner. 1986. Gesammelte Irrtümer 1. Interviews und Gespräche. Verlag der Autoren: Frankfurt am Main. Müller, Heiner. 1990. ‘Shakespeare a Difference.’ Translated by Carl Weber. Performing Arts Journal 12 (2/3): 31–35. Müller, Heiner. 1994. Krieg ohne Schlacht. Leben in zwei Diktaturen. Eine Autobiographie. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. Müller, Heiner. 2001a. The Hamletmachine. Translated by Dennis Redmond. http://www.efn.org/~dredmond/Hamletmachine.PDF. Accessed 27 May 2019. Müller, Heiner. 2001b. Die Hamletmaschine. Frankfurt am Main: Surkhamp. Müller, Heiner. n. d. ‘An Excerpt from Heiner Müller’s 1961 Play Tractor.’ Translated by Dennis Redmond. http://www.efn.org/~dredmond/MuellerPr ose.PDF. Accessed 27 May 2019. Petersohn, Roland. 1993. Heiner Müllers Shakespeare-Rezeption: Texte und Kontexte. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Shakespeare, William. 2007. Hamlet. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. The Arden Shakespeare. Third Series. London: Thomson Learning. Sugiera, Małgorzata. 1997. Wariacje szekspirowskie w powojennym dramacie europejskim. Kraków: Universitas. Taubeneck, Steven. 1991. ‘Deconstructing the GDR: Heiner Mueller and Postmodern Cultural Politics.’ Pacific Coast Philology 26 (1/2) (July): 85–95. Teraoka, Arlene Akiko. 1985. The Silence of Entropy or Universal Discourse. The Postmodernist Poetics of Heiner Müller. New York: Peter Lang Publishing. Walsh, Brian. 2001. ‘The Rest Is Violence: Müller Contra Shakespeare.’ PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 23 (3) (September): 24–35. Weber, Carl. 1980. ‘Heiner Müller: The Despair and the Hope’. Performing Arts Journal 4 (3): 135–140.

CHAPTER 8

Hamlet’s Lunacy, CREW

Hamlet’s Lunacy is a radical experiment with the theatrical form. It revises mainstream stage conventions that concern acting and spectating in a shared physical space, proposing a novel performance type that brings together live and digital elements in a mixed reality mode. The production is partly improvised, with an actor (Jerry Killick) directly interacting with the audience. It is also a promenade performance in that the spectators follow Killick from the foyer into a large and almost empty studio, where they continue to move around the space. Finally, it is immersive, in both the physical sense of allowing the audience members to walk freely and be part of the environment in the company of others and the virtual sense of inviting them to a computer-generated world, in which they encounter digital avatars and objects. The flow of the production depends on the actor guiding the spectators—physically through the space and metaphorically through the script. In an interactive and ironic mode Killick engages the audience in various tasks, some of which might involve the applications of augmented and virtual reality. He also explains the key contexts for understanding Hamlet, such as the debates about the organisation of the universe, the obligation to execute personal revenge, or the Divine Right of kings. All these contexts expand on the themes from the source; meanwhile, the core events from the tragedy are not enacted in front of the audience. In the middle of the show, however, the spectators are given a brief plot © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Mancewicz, Hamlet after Deconstruction, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96806-9_8

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summary of Hamlet, and at the end they witness a symbolical mediatized representation of multiple deaths that culminate Shakespeare’s tragedy. As a mixed reality experiment, Hamlet’s Lunacy reflects CREW’s interest in technology. This Brussels-based performance collective was founded in 1991 by Eric Joris, and it is unique for applications of cuttingedge digital tools in live performance and close collaborations with scientists and artists, including the long-term partnership with the Expertise Centre for Digital Media at the University of Hasselt in Belgium. Over the last thirty years, the collective has pioneered applications of virtual reality and motion-tracking in live theatre and the arts, developing new technologies together with tech designers, digital research centres, and industry partners. CREW has experimented not only with a range of technologies, but also with a variety of genres, including one-to-one performances, visual arts installations, performance lectures, remote live theatre, and mixed reality stage productions. The immersive character of the production combines highly advanced technology, which has enabled mixed reality mode of performance, with an avant-garde theatrical tradition, which goes back to the 1980s, and perhaps even earlier to the 1960s. The legacy of this tradition might be seen in the work of two performance collectives whose members or regular collaborators have indirectly or directly contributed to the show’s creation: URLAND and Forced Entertainment. Incidentally, both these groups were established by theatre graduates, who were driven by their desire to revolutionise staging—URLAND in 2010 by the graduates from Maastricht’s theatre academy in the Netherlands (Toneelacademie Maastricht) and Forced Entertainment in 1984 by the graduates from the University of Exeter in the UK. The two companies have knowingly and self-consciously mixed cultural references with disparate conventions and styles of theatre to reflect on the nature of live performance in a mediatized society. The Dutch collective defines itself on its website as follows: ‘URLAND experiments. URLAND refers, quotes and samples. URLAND sees technology as a means, not an end. URLAND believes in live art in digital times.’ As their former teacher Henk Havens notes, ‘They are explorers of culture, they constantly question our digital state of being in their work’ (qtd. in Kattenbelt and Havens 2019: 187). Similarly, Stefka Mihaylova describes Forced Entertainment as a group preoccupied with an ‘inquiry into authenticity and illusion – what they mean to spectators whose perceptions of reality are deeply mediated by electronic and digital technologies’ (2020: 341). Members of these

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two collectives were thus ideally placed to work with CREW, and they have helped to develop a fluid, kinaesthetic, and slightly disorienting setup that distinguishes the company’s approach to Shakespeare’s tragedy. Thomas Dudkiewicz and Marijn Alexander de Jong from URLAND have contributed to designing the initial iterations of CREW’s Hamlet project that, in turn, have inspired Hamlet’s Lunacy, whereas Killick from Forced Entertainment has enriched it further with his interactive and playful performance. Ultimately, however, such description necessarily simplifies a complex interdisciplinary process of development, in which creative contributions are not easy to define and demarcate. Hamlet’s Lunacy emerges from several years of collaborative research and practice, which complicates the production’s authorship and standalone status. It is not straightforward to assign clearly cut creative roles to collaborators in the process. Multiple iterations of CREW’s Hamlet have involved a wide range of contributors with overlapping and changing responsibilities for directing, dramaturgy, and acting. This has included artists and technicians from CREW, headed by CREW’s Artistic Director, Joris, but also Mesut Arslan from Platform 0090, Keez Duyves from PIPS:lab, Killick, Dudkiewicz and de Jong, as well as academics: Chiel Kattenbelt, Robin Nelson, and Aneta Mancewicz. Hamlet’s Lunacy itself was developed by Joris, Arslan and Duyves as co-directors, with Kattenbelt as a dramaturg, and Killick as a performer. For convenience, however, I will refer to this work as CREW’s adaptation, given the company’s leading and consistent role in its design, production, and funding. Similarly, it is important to note that Hamlet’s Lunacy is part of a creative cluster. The production builds on two earlier public versions, while inspiring a later remote version. The first official showing of CREW’s work on Shakespeare’s tragedy was Hands-on-Hamlet (2017), a short installation presented at international conferences and festivals in Europe, where individuals were offered a few-minute virtual reality experience of scenes from Hamlet. This version included two distinctive worlds. In the first one, the audience could walk around the ruins of a castle, based on 3-D scans of a historical castle, which were digitally drawn-upon by Joris to create a decrepit and dreamy environment; in the second, they could observe omni-directional videos from rehearsals. In the first world, they could follow passages from Shakespeare’s tragedy enacted by historically clad avatars (with Dudkiewicz in the role of Hamlet); in the second, they could see the actors in motion-capture suits recording their lines. Spectators wearing virtual reality headsets and headphones were able to

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switch between these two immersive set-ups by looking inside a spherical shape embedded in the digital environment, in an allusion to the play’s preoccupation with celestial objects. The second iteration of the project was Hamlet Encounters (2018), a live performance at KVS theatre in Brussels, with four groups of three audience members moving in circuit, with action occurring simultaneously in four spaces of the studio. The audience members could wear motion-capture suits and operate their avatars on screen, but they could also experience short virtual reality scenes from Hands-on-Hamlet installation. The piece was followed by Hamlet’s Lunacy (2019), another live show at KVS, in which the spectators were guided through the performance by Killick, with some of them experiencing augmented reality scenes and virtual reality immersions (partly new and partly adapted from previous versions). The latest iteration has been Hamlet’s Playground (2021), an online version featuring Dudkiewicz and Killick, in which CREW adapted the promenade character of Hamlet’s Lunacy for a post-Covid era. The production was designed as a series of performances on the digital platform Gather, with actors and audience members situated in their individual locations, interacting online in real time. This chapter focuses on Hamlet’s Lunacy as the most dramaturgically advanced iteration of CREW’s cycle and, in particular, as one that exemplifies with greatest clarity the notion of différance in Hamlet ’s adaptation. In discussing the production, I draw on two performances that I experienced live on 10 and 11 April 2019, as well as the unpublished performance script provided by CREW. The following analysis focuses on the adaptation’s deconstructive potential. It looks at how this version accumulates, contrasts, and questions ideas related to the source to portray a paradigm shift in Shakespeare’s lifetime. The application of différance in Hamlet’s Lunacy, as in the case of Heiner Müller’s The Hamletmachine, reflects the artists’ fascination with Hamlet ’s historical complexity, alongside their critical perspective towards the present. In this chapter, I argue that the multiplicity of contexts, identities, and perceptions in CREW’s production reveals fundamental divisions and cracks within Shakespeare’s tragedy. Moreover, in showing the entanglements of the tragedy with critical debates and problems of the Renaissance period, CREW implicitly points to the current crisis of values.

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Contexts Hamlet’s Lunacy introduces a variety of historical contexts, which are based on extensive research conducted by CREW and its collaborators. This approach might suggest that the production strives to fulfil a role often assigned to adaptations of classical texts, which is to explain and expand a historically distant source. The focus on facts and scholarly apparatus is indeed helpful in enlarging the frame of Shakespeare’s tragedy, and the audience can learn a great deal about topics and themes that were popular in the Renaissance period and that inform Hamlet. However, as soon as Killick begins to introduce historical information, it becomes clear that his goal is not so much to offer clarifications and certainties as to raise questions and doubts. In this production, the desire to illuminate the source is always thwarted by the spirit of scepticism, which originates in the source itself. At the heart of Hamlet’s Lunacy is the collapse of the medieval world order and the birth of the Renaissance sensibility, which in turn has resonances for the contemporary political crisis and the climate catastrophe. As Kattenbelt, a dramaturg of this performance observes, ‘However much the world of around 1600 differs from ours, it has at least one aspect in common, namely that our world is also experienced by many people in many respects as being “out of joint” and as a turning point in the history of the earth and humankind, in particular politically (the rise of populism and large scale migration movements), economically (the rise of globalisation and protectionism) and ecologically (global warming and climate change as a result of this)’ (2021: 31). Consequently, Hamlet’s Lunacy and other iterations of CREW’s Hamlet project have sought to draw the links between the historical crisis and the contemporary one, yet without making the analogies overexplicit and simplistic. In Kattenbelt’s words, ‘If we succeed in making perceivable and experienceable Hamlet’s world as a world out of joint and in transition, then we have to trust the experiencer – and that means to take her/him seriously – that s/he is capable of making the connections with the lifeworld of today’ (2021: 34). This might explain why the distinctive historical paradigms in Hamlet’s Lunacy are not so much in opposition to each other as in the relationship of différance, which refers here to a playful mixture of contrasts and similarities that disrupt the play’s linear progress and introduce a profound sense of uncertainty. The audience in this production is invited to experience the paradigm shift through

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their own body and perception, which in turn is expected to activate their reflection on the contemporary condition. The interrogative mood adopted by CREW is thus justified by the nature of the historical material included in the production, but it also stems from the methodology chosen by the company and its collaborators. Hamlet’s Lunacy is a culmination of work developed in the framework of Practice as Research (PaR). The guiding principle of PaR is that research is undertaken through a practice. As a process, it combines theoretical study with workshops and performance development; it also draws on earlier projects on a given subject, while activating wider artistic and social contexts. There are a number of approaches to PaR, but CREW draws specifically on Nelson’s model as articulated in his Practice as Research in the Arts (2013b), with the researcher advising on methodological issues, alongside his contributions to dramaturgy and acting. According to Nelson, PaR begins with a unique ‘research inquiry’ (2013b: 30)—a line of investigation that aims to produce insights rather than definitive conclusions. Consequently, the company’s exploration of Hamlet opened with identifying the guiding research question, which in this case was articulated as follows: How to act honourably in a conflicted world? The conflicted world, central to CREW’s adaptation of Hamlet, refers to the seventeenth-century England, in which Shakespeare wrote his iconic tragedy, but the idea of conflict has also important implications for the twenty-first-century Europe, in which the Belgian company has set out to develop their adaptations. Both these periods, according to CREW, are marked by a fundamental paradigm shift. In the case of Renaissance England, the scholars have extensively discussed the transition from a medieval set of values to a modern one within a range of areas. C.S. Lewis, for instance, compellingly argued in his Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature that the Middle Ages developed a distinct ‘Model’—a collection of images and ideas that served as a repository for artists until it was abandoned by the end of the seventeenth century (1964: 13). The infamous Carl Schmitt, in turn, noted that England exhibited the European spirit of transition and rupture in its own way, since the country was torn by the political intrigues around succession at the turn of the seventeenth century, that is towards the end of Queen Elizabeth’s life and before the ascension of King James (2006: 17). Additionally, between 1588 and 1688, England began to experience the change from barbarism to politics, or,

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to put it differently, from feudal and religious models of society to a modern idea of the state (Schmitt 2006: 54–55). The process ran parallel to the country shifting its focus from land to sea and from attachments to Continental Europe to the global expansion, with English trade companies soon introducing colonial and imperial models of governance on an international scale (Schmitt 2006: 55–56). Shakespeare wrote thus in an extraordinary time when contrasting ideas about the world clashed with each other, with echoes of this conflict reverberating through his works. Moreover, Dan Falk insists that the playwright was not only active in the era of exceptional intellectual transformation in Western history, but also that his dramas demonstrate an awareness of the most recent scientific ideas: […] Shakespeare lived in a remarkable time. The medieval world – a world of magic, astrology, witchcraft, and superstition of all kinds – was just beginning to give way to more modern ways of thinking. Shakespeare and Galileo were born in the same year, and new ideas about the human body, the Earth, and the universe at large were just starting to transform Western thought. (2014: 6)

Falk claims that scholars have tended to assume that Shakespeare’s plays reflected only the medieval world view, but he believes that there are also echoes of more modern, scientific ideas in his works, including Hamlet (2014: 6–12, 145–169). At the same time, his observation that Shakespeare and Galileo Galilei share the year of birth underlines the crucial importance of astronomy in the period, as well as the connections between arts and science. Indeed, one of the major issues of contention and a marker of the paradigm shift from medieval to modern world views concerned debates about the organisation of the universe. These debates were part of a broader scientific and social revolution. The dispute between geocentric versus heliocentric theories of the universe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was of critical importance, which went beyond astronomy to influence the views on monarchy, religion, and science. Its echoes can be found not only in scholarly treatises but also in religious and literary works. For instance, John Donne, an eminent Renaissance poet, scholar, and a cleric in the Church of England, as well as Shakespeare’s contemporary, noted in his poem, ‘An Anatomie of the World. The First Anniversary’:

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And new Philosophy calls all in doubt, The Element of fire is quite put out; The Sun is lost, and th’earth, and no man’s wit Can well direct him where to looke for it. And freely man confesse that this world’s spent, When in the Planets, and the Firmament They seeke so many new; then see that this Is crumbled out againe to his Atomies. (1994: 191)

This often-quoted passage captures a profound sense of rupture and confusion resulting from the astronomical revolution in the period, but it also symbolically hints at other rifts, such as the troubled and violent divisions between Catholicism and Protestantism, which have personally affected Donne and others in his generation. Similarly, in Hamlet, the eponymous protagonist experiences disorientation and doubt concerning ethical, religious, and political issues, which he expresses in a series of soliloquies. Hamlet’s disturbed mind is a reflection of his troubled world. In Hamlet’s Lunacy, astronomical debates are at the centre of the production, both as a fundamental context for understanding the source and as a performance material. CREW’s approach to Hamlet is similar to the interpretation advanced by the astronomer Peter Usher, who sees the tragedy as ‘an allegory about competing cosmological worldviews,’ in particular the theories of Ptolemy, Nicolaus Copernicus, and Tycho Brahe (Falk 2014: 10). In Hamlet’s Lunacy, the company focuses on the ideas of Ptolemy and Tycho, and it visually represents them to the audience. Astronomy is staged in several scenes in this adaptation, including an instance when selected audience members enact the organisation of the Solar System as theorised by Ptolemy about 150 CE. By moving in the physical space to follow the direction and the speed of their allocated planets as shown on iPads in an augmented reality mode, audience members visually illustrate the Ptolemaic model in representation of a human orrery. The tradition of enacting orreries, that is mechanical models of the Solar System, dates back at least to the eighteenth century and was common in English schools as an educational exercise; it is still present today in pedagogy and performance (Vanhoutte and Bigg 2014: 259). CREW expands and enriches this tradition by applying augmented reality technology, which enhances sensorial experience of the users. The movement of the spectators and the stars is coordinated to allow for greater immersion and fuller audience engagement.

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In inviting selected audience members to enact the Solar System, CREW allows them to experience it both kinaesthetically and visually. The movement of the planets represents a distinctive conception of the physical world, yet Killick is also keen to emphasise the social and political implications of both the Ptolemaic and Tychonic models. He associates the Ptolemaic System with the idea of the Divine Order, which is defined by the hierarchy of beings and the harmony of their co-existence, with God and his earthly representative, the king, placed firmly at the top. The Tychonic System, in turn, is presented as one that complicates the movement of celestial objects and introduces an unstable and changeable reality, with God’s and the king’s supreme positions in doubt. Tycho’s discoveries had thus important implications in terms of introducing the existential uncertainty. Having described them in the production, Killick in the role of Tycho himself concludes, ‘And so with observation we may learn about the world and see it is not the world we formerly believed, but is a different place of wonder that reveals itself newly to us every day’ (Joris and Morell 2019: 5). The comment not only challenges the previously held astronomical beliefs, but it also manifests the spirit of scepticism. From this perspective, scientific investigation (‘observation’) is crucial not so much to our better understanding of the world as to undermining our false perceptions of it. Such constant revision of assumptions is thought to inspire a sense of awe with the reality that ‘reveals itself newly to us every day,’ but it also produces a profound feeling of anxiety, given that old certainties have been successfully questioned, yet a more accurate and comprehensive view of reality has not yet emerged. In the context of constantly changing views about the universe in the Renaissance, CREW foregrounds King James as Hamlet’s surrogate. This interpretation echoes Schmitt’s argument in which he presented the Stuart history as an intrusion into the texture of the play, with fundamental analogies between the historical king and the fictional prince as the source of tragedy in Shakespeare’s drama (2006: 23–24). Most importantly, Hamlet’s Lunacy draws on parallels between James and Hamlet concerning their obligation to revenge their fathers, which contributes to the understanding of these figures as thinking subjects. In CREW’s version, the monarch strives to resolve different, and in some cases irreconcilable modes of understanding and organising the Renaissance reality. Caught in the paradoxes of his rapidly changing world, he perceives them through the principle of différance. He can clearly see the fracture in

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the Renaissance world picture and the opposing views on both sides. He knows that the old order is no longer valid, but he also realises that the new one is insufficient and certainly not satisfactory to him. Consequently, the protagonist hesitates between different paradigms, while he struggles to arrive at permanent solutions. This creates the state of suspension and intellectual tension, which is most clearly visible in the portrayal of revenge. While Hamlet’s Lunacy draws only on a few, carefully selected excerpts from the source, a key aspect of CREW’s portrayal of the thinking process concerns the topic of revenge, which is examined in great detail. In Shakespeare’s tragedy, revenge is the driving force of the plot: the call for vengeance opens the action, and its enactment gives it closure. It is also the central moral dilemma, which inspires Hamlet’s reflection on several issues from acting to afterlife. Furthermore, the protagonist’s hesitant and questioning attitude distinguishes Shakespeare’s drama from other revenge tragedies of the period. In CREW’s production, the topic of vengeance anchors the adaptation in the historical debates of its source, particularly since the main avenger in the play is not Hamlet but King James himself. During the performance, Killick presents and explains to the spectators The Memorial of Lord Darnley—Livinus de Vogelaare’s painting from 1567, which commemorates the violent death of Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley—the second husband of Mary Stuart, known as Queen of Scots, and the father of the future King James VI of Scotland and I of England—who was killed in gunpowder explosion. James Hepburn, the 4th Earl of Bothwell was soon accused of murder, together with Mary herself, who was not only rumoured to have had an affair with Bothwell, but who also married him three months later; suspicion of her involvement in the crime has eventually contributed to her political downfall. The Memorial, commissioned by Darnley’s parents, the Earl and Countess of Lennox, is significant in that it not only accuses Mary and Bothwell of assassination, but it also calls for vengeance. The painting enforces parallels between King James and Hamlet as revenging sons, indicating the widespread preoccupation with filial duty and honour in the period. After all, Shakespeare in his tragedy introduces not just one but three revenging sons: Hamlet, Laertes, and Fortinbras. The Memorial of Lord Darnley also points to the importance of revenge within the Renaissance culture, when the concept was in the process of social and legal transformation.

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Through parallels between King James and Hamlet, as well as the focus on the ruling monarch as an avenger, the production approaches the call for vengeance from a historical perspective, acknowledging that this concept was highly contested and debated in the Renaissance period. According to Ronald Broude, the Middle Ages was characterised by the co-existence of two ‘socio-legal systems embodying complementary definitions of “offense” and “punishment”’ (1975: 43). The older system emerged when societies were organised into small units which relied on self-rule; in this system members of the group were entitled to private punishment for wrongs done to a person or a property on behalf of a victim or their family (1975: 43). The newer system, in turn, evolved when societies developed into more complex social and legal entities, with a stronger central government; in this context, revenge was not a private but a public matter, and it was not to be executed directly by wronged individuals or their families bur rather by appropriate state agents (1975: 43). During Shakespeare’s lifetime, which coincided with the reign of two charismatic monarchs, Elizabeth I and then James VI and I, the two systems began to be increasingly at odds with each other, since, as Broude argues, ‘the various concepts and customs subsumed under the Renaissance word [revenge] were the object of searching reevaluation during the sixteenth century, as the Tudor and Stuart dynasties sought to adapt medieval English socio-legal institutions to the needs of a Renaissance state’ (1975: 39). Fredson Bowers shows how this ‘reevaluation’ manifests itself in Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedies (1940). Like many among them, Hamlet reflects an effort to capture and comprehend the changing social perceptions and legal ramifications of revenge in the period, while the play simultaneously addresses broader shifts from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance in science, politics, and religion. Similarly, in Hamlet’s Lunacy the questions around the execution of revenge are associated with epochal transformations and transitions related to astronomical discoveries as well as changing models of monarchy and society. What transpires from these multiple historical contexts is a deep sense of uncertainty and anxiety over the right course of action. Ultimately, the guiding question of CREW’s production: ‘How to act honourably in a conflicted world?’ remains precisely what it is—a question. The production does not provide definitive answers, but instead, in the spirit of différance, it exposes a number of contrasting concepts and leaves them unresolved. It is precisely this lack of resolution that hints at analogies

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with present times in CREW’s production. Although the adaptation does not explicitly mention specific political or social events from the twentyfirst century, it relies on the potential of digital technologies to revise our perceptions of reality, whereas Killick’s reflections about conflicting social and political models resonate strongly with contemporary audiences. The epochal shift in Hamlet’s Lunacy can be seen as an allusion to the growing awareness about the insufficiency of current political structures for tackling fundamental global problems, such as the climate crisis, the migration crisis, or the growth of inequality. From this perspective, CREW’s production shows that the twenty-first-century Europe is undergoing a similar moment of transition as the one experienced by Shakespeare four centuries earlier. We have realised that our social and political frameworks are inadequate, yet we still have not found successful models to replace them. The application of mixed reality supports the process of testing multiple hypotheses and options in this adaptation both in terms of mapping the future of performance and exploring new social and cultural frameworks that have been enabled by augmented and virtual reality. In surveying a range of historical contexts, Hamlet’s Lunacy does not aim to explain its source but instead it challenges it, revealing fundamental shifts and rifts at the heart of Shakespeare’s tragedy. At the same time, CREW’s adaptation does not explicitly elucidate Hamlet’s character, focusing instead on King James, as well as other historical figures from the period, such as Tycho. The portrayal of identity in this production owes greatly to avant-garde performance traditions, which is highly appropriate, given that Hamlet as its source represents, in the words of R. S. White, ‘an avant-garde vision of struggle against conformity that retains an edge of provocative novelty’ (2015: 1). At the same time, identity is inscribed in a larger deconstructive framework of this adaptation, where a dialectical relationship between Hamlet and King James signals a critical attitude towards a character as a psychological and theatrical construct.

Identities Although CREW’s adaptation is entitled Hamlet’s Lunacy, its focus on the eponymous hero is not straightforward. Throughout the performance Killick takes on several roles, most consistently the role of King James, while his references to Hamlet tend to be fleeting and flippant. Consequently, Shakespeare’s prince appears only briefly, almost as an

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afterthought, as the spectators gain access to him mainly through virtual reality immersions and projections. What emerges from this approach to the character is a post-structuralist idea of identity, one in the manner of différance, in which the similarities and differences between Hamlet and King James make it possible to understand Shakespeare’s protagonist, but only to a point. Ultimately the Danish prince is never fully present in this performance as a psychologically developed individual, while his portrayal through opposition with the English king makes evident the distinction between a fictional protagonist and a historical figure. In this adaptation, King James serves both as a context and contrast for Hamlet, but also as a constant reminder that the eponymous hero is an imagined character: imagined originally by Shakespeare, then by the actor performing the role, and finally, by the audience witnessing the performance. This act of imagination is strongly underlined in CREW’s adaptation since Killick exposes several strategies that underpin the make-believe nature of his interaction with the audience. These strategies draw on his collaboration with Forced Entertainment as a company which represents a well-recognised strand of avant-garde performance in Europe. According to Sara Jane Bailes, the British company ‘has resisted the historical dominance of the well-formed, three-act play as a repository for the development of character, plot, and a cohesive linear narrative that progresses through (first person) dialogue’ (2011: 67). A similar spirit of resistance informs Killick’s performance in Hamlet’s Lunacy and determines his approach to acting. Killick’s acting style resonates also with the strategy adopted by the members of URLAND, who, according to Kattenbelt, ‘In whatever they play or play with, they always play with the fact that they play. Not in order to relativize and ironize what they play, but to express in the authenticity of what they are doing that it is really about something, that there is also something at stake in what they play and that there is always something vulnerable in it’ (qtd. in Kattenbelt and Havens 2019: 186). Dudkiewicz’s portrayal of Hamlet in Handson-Hamlet installation, which haunts VR imagery in Hamlet’s Lunacy, has established a playful model of acting, which finds it continuation and amplification in Killick’s performance. Perhaps the most important acting strategy adopted by Killick consists in exposing the contract between the actor and the audience by positioning the performer in the role of a host responsible for entertaining the spectators. In Forced Entertainment’s practice, this contract is often questioned, as the company reveals ‘the contrived nature of the contractual

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exchange between performer and spectator upon which all live entertainment is predicated, whereby the former, in her agreement to perform is, by virtue of this voluntary temporary arrangement, obliged to entertain the latter in her role as spectator’ (Bailes 2011: 63). In Hamlet’s Lunacy Killick does not explicitly challenge his role of an entertainer, but he performs it playfully and self-consciously, particularly when he briefly delivers the lines and gestures of other characters. This introduces another avant-garde strategy that exposes the make-believe character of this production, that is a style of acting that Michael Kirby defines as ‘nonmatrixed representation’ referring to situations in which ‘performers […] do not do anything to reinforce the information or identification’ (1987: 4). Philip Auslander notes that this style became popular in the 1960s and the 1970s, replacing more conventional approaches to performance (2008: 32). As a regular collaborator of Forced Entertainment, Killick is well-versed in this form of representation, which by now has dominated avant-garde theatre practice and which questions the need for firm boundaries between illusion and authenticity. Nonmatrixed representation allows Killick to maintain his function of a host without having to embody a rounded psychological character. It can also make the audience believe that his performance is unscripted and authentic. At the same time, when Killick does take on specific roles in the production, he portrays them rather superficially, as he swiftly moves between different characters, relying on the spectators to fill in the gaps in the portrayal of the protagonists. All these strategies become immediately visible in Killick’s opening speech. The actor inaugurates the performance by introducing himself— or rather multiple versions of himself—with which he signals a playful approach to the character. The show begins in the foyer, where Killick addresses the spectators with the following introduction: ‘Welcome, everyone. My name is Eric Joris. They didn’t kill my father’ (Joris and Morell 2019: 1). In this short and seemingly simple presentation, there is an overlap of different identities, as well as different degrees of reality and illusion. With the phrase ‘Welcome, everyone,’ the actor speaks to the audience, acknowledging their presence. Given that the line is pronounced before the spectators enter the auditorium, it marks a crucial moment in the performance. In this instance, the actor explicitly establishes a contract with the audience, positioning himself in a hosting and leading role, but he also makes himself responsible for entertaining the spectators. At the same time, Killick might be still seen as just being

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himself, and his words might be interpreted as a spontaneous, unscripted address. His behaviour in this scene, which consists in simply doing things without aiming to enact a specific character, is also a good example of nonmatrixed representation. Because the actor is not really acting but going through the motions, his behaviour might seem to the audience more real or authentic. The initial address becomes further complicated when in the very next sentence Killick introduces himself as Joris, the show’s co-director, who is also present in the foyer, together with the spectators. Audience members familiar with Killick or Joris will be aware that the actor is impersonating someone else. Others might think that they are told a fictional name that stands for a character in the play that is about to happen. From this perspective, Killick appears as an actor who plays another character, Joris, who in turn will play King James. Finally, there will be those who will believe that the performer is giving them his true name, and that this introduction is a natural continuation of his personal welcome. The use of Joris’s name in Hamlet’s Lunacy brings thus a peculiar mixture of authenticity and fiction. Yet perhaps the most striking example of this mixture is the last sentence in the initial address. When Killick announces, ‘They didn’t kill my father,’ he might be speaking as himself and/or Joris, but most importantly here, he is not speaking as Hamlet. The implicit rejection of Hamlet’s identity in Hamlet’s Lunacy resonates with the direct renouncement of Hamlet’s role in The Hamletmachine, where Hamlet-Actor announces, ‘I am not Hamlet. I play no role anymore. My words have nothing more to say to me’ (2001: 5). In both adaptations, the protagonists as actors reject the identification with Hamlet as a character, giving the audience an impression of direct and intimate connection, despite the scripted nature of this interaction. At the same time, however, the two actors reject more than just a character— they also discard Hamlet as a play with a unique status in theatre tradition. This idea is visually represented in The Hamletmachine, where HamletActor notes in the fourth, penultimate scene, ‘Behind me the scenery is being taken down. By people who are not interested in my drama, for people, to whom it doesn’t matter’ (2001: 5). While he pronounces these words, the stagehands are changing the set, which represents an attempt at making space to create a new kind of play, which could produce a modern revolution and a new kind of hero.

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In Hamlet’s Lunacy, in turn, the dismantling of Shakespeare’s tragedy occurs not so much through violent negation as through playful juxtaposition of possibilities. Immediately after Killick has declared the following: ‘They didn’t kill my father,’ he brings the audience into the performance space, in front of the revenge painting, where he declares, ‘But they did kill my father.’ It is in this very instance that he assumes the role of King James, who might be seen both as an inspiration for Hamlet and his opposition. There are powerful similarities between the stories of these two figures, which include their father’s violent assassination and the potential of their mother’s complicity, especially given subsequent marriage with the murderer both in the case of Gertrude and Mary. At the same time, however, there are crucial differences between Hamlet and King James, concerning, for example, their status at the court and their involvement in pursuing punishment. Ultimately Hamlet does not become king, but he succeeds in killing Claudius. By contrast, James ascends first the Scottish and then the English throne, yet he does not pursue revenge of his father’s assassinator—not least because he is only twelve when Bothwell dies imprisoned in Denmark. Hamlet’s story is thus used in Hamlet’s Lunacy to suit the demands of tragedy, whereas James’s remains anchored in history. However, what is particularly important in CREW’s adaptation is that in portraying the characters through a range of avant-garde strategies Killick makes it possible for the audience to see them as imagined and changeable constructs. This situates both the historical figures and the fictional heroes in the relationship of différance, where their similarities and differences bounce off each other in an intricate web of contexts and identities that form the basis of Killick’s performance. The importance of différance is strengthened by the combination of real and virtual environments in this performance, since the application of mixed reality makes it possible for the audience to hold different contexts and identities together. It also allows for transitions between multiple worlds and perspectives as well as for the creation of what Nele Wynants et al. define with reference to CREW’s work with technology as ‘transitional space[s]’ (2008: 161) and what Joris himself calls ‘the transitional zone’ (qtd. in Nedelkopoulou et al. 2014: 249). Those transitional moments are crucial for challenging the perception of the spectators, which in turn contributes to the overall deconstructive thrust of this adaptation.

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Perceptions To support the exploration of different contexts and identities, Hamlet’s Lunacy experiments with mixed reality, showing how physical and virtual elements might co-exist and complement each other. The actor and the spectators are interacting physically in the same space at the same time, but they also experience different degrees of augmented and virtual reality in a mixed reality mode. Mixed reality, by definition, encourages combinations of various kinds of experience and perception. A report on immersive economy, co-authored by Immerse UK and Digital Catapult, describes it as follows: ‘Blending physical and virtual worlds to produce new environments and visualisations where physical and digital objects co-exist and interact in real time’ (2019: 6). The crucial aspect of mixed reality is that this ‘blending’ is open to multiple combinations of real and digitally produced elements, which alter the user’s perception of their body and the space. Already in the 1990s Paul Milgram et al. insisted on approaching mixed reality as a spectrum of possibilities: they saw mixed reality ‘as one in which real world and virtual world objects are presented together within a single display, that is, anywhere between the extrema of the RV [reality virtuality] continuum’ (1994: 283). Their definition underlines different degrees of the virtual infiltrating the real, gesturing at the possibility of various set-ups, which range from the dominance of physical settings and stimuli to complete virtual immersions. Such continuum defies a clear-cut distinction between real and virtual environments. As Wynants et al. observe, ‘we would no longer describe the embodied environment in terms of virtual as opposed to real, but as a transitional space in between different levels of perceived reality’ (2008: 161). In Hamlet’s Lunacy, the continuum stretches from a live physical environment, to augmented reality instances, to virtual reality immersions for selected participants. Those set-ups are incorporated into the dramaturgy of the performance, often to illustrate Killick’s argument and visualise his points, as when the actor manipulates the digital image of de Vogelaare’s painting to explain the story of Lord Darnley and his relationship with King James. However, the most important in terms of deconstructive thrust of this adaptation are those instances when virtual elements are applied to change the perception of the spectators. In those moments, audience members become more alert and aware of their senses, which allows them to experience their bodies and their relationship with the space more self-consciously. At the same time, the possibility

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of questioning their perception allows the spectators to physically experience the historical dissonances and uncertainties associated with Hamlet in this adaptation. In Hamlet’s Lunacy, the audiences are invited to access différance through their body. Mixed reality is ideally placed to enable heightened modes of perception. It is particularly effective when the differences or transitions between real and virtual environments are explicitly marked and made visible to the audience. While complete immersion is the goal of cinema and gaming industry, in theatre the most exciting applications of virtual reality involve disruptions of the immersive illusion. In charting CREW’s artistic development, Joris points to the company’s growing interest in transitions between real and virtual elements: Continuous and total absorption was possible, and that was very interesting at the beginning. We called this ‘radical confluence’, but soon we found that the doubt of being in the middle of two realities is far more fascinating. We decided to follow a slightly different artistic path. We’d rather have our playing field in the middle of two realities, one leg in the virtual, one leg in the real and the capacity of the mind of the immersant to balance and shift in between these two realities; what we identify as ‘the transitional zone’. (qtd. in Nedelkopoulou et al. 2014: 249)

Joris’s comment reveals CREW’s fascination with the possibilities of merging real and virtual elements in a way that their differences remain visible and felt. Some of the most striking examples of creating ‘the transitional zone’ in CREW’s practice concern the application of omnidirectional video (OVD), in which the spectator can access filmed footage in a 360-degree view thanks to a head-mounted display, with an orientation tracker following the direction and the focus of the spectator’s view. As Wynants et al. observe, ‘The visual and spatial characteristics [of OVD] are different from Virtual Reality (VR) where the user is immersed in a synthetic designed world’ (2008: 157). Whereas virtual reality transports the users into fictional environments, aiming to create a sense of reality in imagined circumstances, OVD captures real physical spaces, giving the users an opportunity to question the nature of the real. In their productions, CREW frequently captures footage in an actual venue in which the rehearsals or the performances take place. In Hands-on-Hamlet installation, for instance, the footage from the rehearsals shows the making of the scenes with the actors in CREW’s studio, revealing the mechanics

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of motion-capture and the corporeality of virtual avatars. This strategy further blurs the boundaries between what has already happened and what is happening now but also between what has actually happened and what merely seems to have happened. The blurring becomes particularly evident when the company introduces fictional elements into real spaces to unsettle the users, forcing them to question their perception of time, space, and their own body. A striking example of CREW’s strategy of challenging the users’ perception through the application of OVD is the 2008 performance EUX . In an early iteration of this piece, the participants walk in the corridors of La Chartreuse monastery in Avignon, France. First, they explore the venue listening to a story narrated through the headphones, and then, equipped in head-mounted displays and with the help of an actor, they navigate the same space virtually by accessing pre-recorded footage. The first physical walk establishes familiarity with the location, which is then challenged in the second virtual walk, in which the immersants encounter strange creatures, who are wearing the same equipment as them. When the footage shows the immersants colliding with these creatures, an actor subjects the immersants to the same action in real time. The transformation of the real and recognisable environment through eerie elements, together with the coordination of pre-recorded footage with synchronised live actions, unravels distinctions between the real and the virtual. Wynants et al. describe the ultimate result of this set-up as ‘a transitional space in between different levels of perceived reality’ in which ‘different sensorial stimuli (live, prerecorded and mediated)’ are mixed together, while ‘the senses are played off against each other, in a perpetual negotiation about the experienced environment’ (2008: 161). Such ‘transitional’ moments in mixed reality set-ups enable heightened corporeal and spatial awareness, but they also introduce a sense of confusion and uncertainty, forcing the participants to question their location and relationships with other people and objects. In Hamlet’s Lunacy, one of the most striking examples of ‘a transitional space’ or ‘transitional zone’ occurs at the end when the tragic finale of Hamlet is symbolically shown as flat-screen projections accompanied by loud music and as virtual reality immersions for a few members of the audience. In this scene, the digital imagery focuses on the poetic portrayal of Hamlet ’s characters and the spaces of Elsinore castle. The sequence features multiple instances of falling, breaking, crumbling, and disappearing. People, maps, objects, buildings, and whole landscapes

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are subjected to change, decay, fragmentation, and annihilation. The processes of downfall and dissolution are evocatively represented through Joris’s haunting drawings and Christoph De Boeck’s poignant music. The users who experience this scene in virtual reality are fully immersed in the digital world, described by Nelson as ‘a dizzying virtual environment of shifting geo-spatial imagery’ (2022: 90), while they are listening to the music through the headphones. What is particularly exciting about their experience, however, is the coordination of the visual and the aural inputs with kinaesthetic ones. During the immersion, the users are holding onto a stick, which is attached to a large projection screen on a movable stand and with a projecting computer attached, while the stage hands are pushing the device through the studio. At first, the stand is moved slowly, then more quickly, until the users holding the stick are forced to run. Since there are two devices being moved simultaneously in the room, they create a stunning choreography of images, screens, and bodies dancing in the space. The performance closes with the devices rotating in the room opposite to each other and then slowly coming to a standstill. As this detailed description demonstrates, in the final scene of Hamlet’s Lunacy audience members are given access to a compelling mixed reality experience, which involves two perspectives. The spectators watching the projections in the room are invited to simultaneously hold in front of them two different realities: the physical reality of the devices and the people in the performance space and the digitally generated reality of images and music. The set-up enables the spectators to establish links between these different realities, while they will inevitably recognise them as distinct and unique elements of the performance. Meanwhile, the selected audience members who access virtual reality through headsets and headphones are able to become fully immersed, but they can also experience their own physicality and the actual space of the room, as they are being led through the studio. Consequently, the immersants gain the possibility of experiencing a sensorial overload, in which their sight, hearing, touch, and movement are affected in a coordinated and meaningful manner to elicit a profoundly emotional response. This confirms Nelson’s observation that virtual reality has the potential to engage the users in novel and radical ways: The virtual reality immersion undoubtedly adds a new level to the notion of intimate encounter, extending the sensorium beyond regular perceptions of the world. The mix of actual and virtual travel, for example, affords a

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new kind of experience, richer than that of the imagination. Though we speak of ‘flights of fancy’, it is not quite the same as hurtling physically through actual space and also in a virtual environment. (Nelson 2013a: 9)

The ‘hurtling […] through’ both physical and virtual spaces in Hamlet’s Lunacy gives the immersants the possibility of negotiating and merging different aspects of their experience. What is particularly significant are those moments in which real and virtual elements do not completely reconcile but rub against each other, as when the immersants are being reminded of their physical location in space, for instance, by having to adjust their movement to the positioning of the device. According to Wynants et al., these moments create the strongest feeling of presence: We would argue that presence, or the feeling of being there, is enhanced in particular during this transitional moments [sic], where one has to redefine his world based on the sensorial information. It is in this shifting moment between the embodied and the perceived world, on the fracture between what we see and what we feel that the spectator has the strongest feeling of being there in an immersive experience. In this transitional experience, the perception of the own body is pushed to the extreme, causing a most confusing corporal awareness. (2008: 161)

‘Transitional moments’ are crucial for altering the perceptions of mixed reality users. They enable the redefinition of senses through sensorial dissociation and dislocation, which results in ‘a most confusing corporal awareness.’ As Steve Benford and Gabriella Giannachi argue, in mixed reality performances ‘participants remain unsure as to what is real and what is performed’ (2011: 45–46), but they might be equally uncertain as to what is embodied and what is imagined. In the final scene of Hamlet’s Lunacy, the immersants experience the tragic finale through multiple senses, which allows them to merge the virtual imagery with their physical surroundings. Their immersion, however, is not meant to be seamless in terms of obliterating the boundary between realities. On the contrary, as they are running through the space, the immersants are bound to become even more aware of their bodies, while the spectators following the immersants from a distance will observe them negotiating different physical and virtual stimuli. The exploration of transitional spaces extends the examination of epochal shifts in Hamlet’s Lunacy. Mixed reality offers not only an

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aesthetic framework for the discussion of historical contexts and identities, but it also contributes thematically to the production’s preoccupation with social and scientific transformations. Artists are still in the process of discovering how augmented and virtual reality settings can meaningfully function in live performance. CREW’s long-term investigation into the potential of mixed reality for the theatre parallels Hamlet’s inquiry into the rapidly changing Renaissance world—an inquiry conducted in this adaptation mainly by King James as Hamlet’s historical alter ego. In this context, différance, with its focus on deferral, offers a theoretical model that captures the fluid and transitional nature of creative and intellectual developments in Hamlet’s Lunacy.

Conclusion In staging Shakespeare’s tragedy, CREW explores contemporary paradoxes and conflicts through a close reading of the play’s text and its contexts. A key premise in the company’s adaptation is an inherently deconstructive idea that Hamlet is not a universal play. The idea assumes that the tragedy does not represent collective and commonly applicable values, but instead it arises from specific historical conditions, in which Shakespeare was writing for his London audiences. Furthermore, the meaning of this drama inevitably changes each time it is staged in a new political and cultural situation. Such premise goes against Romantic and psychological readings identified in the Introduction, which focused on individual characters and their passions. A historically oriented approach finds its direct application in CREW’s performance. On the one hand, the production grows out of a complex network of contexts underpinning Hamlet, including political intrigues and speculations around royal succession, legal and literary aspects of revenge murder, as well as scientific and theological controversies surrounding the shift from the geocentric to the heliocentric model of the universe. On the other hand, it is precisely through these historically situated contexts that Hamlet’s Lunacy speaks to contemporary rifts and divisions, which result from the recent series of crises concerning economy, immigration, and the climate. The historical contexts and the present-day concerns co-exist in the performance to simultaneously differ and mirror each other in a model that might be theorised as différance. CREW’s exploration of Renaissance controversies and debates shows the disappearance of old ways of thinking and the development of a new kind of sensibility, which, in turn, resonates

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with contemporary efforts to establish novel models of political participation and activism. At the same time, through the application of mixed reality the company extends the themes of transformation, transition, and transience in the production to reflect on changing styles of staging and new patterns of perception that they afford to audiences.

References Auslander, Philip. 2008. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. Oxon and New York: Routledge. Bailes, Sara Jane. 2011. Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure: Forced Entertainment, Goat Island, Repair Elevator Service. Oxon and New York: Routledge. Benford, Steve, and Gabriella Giannachi. 2011. Performing Mixed Reality. Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press. Bowers, Fredson. 1940. Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy 1587–1642. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Broude, Ronald. 1975. ‘Revenge and Revenge Tragedy in Renaissance England.’ Renaissance Quarterly 28 (1) (Spring): 38–58. Donne, John. 1994. The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne, edited by Charles M. Coffin. New York: The Modern Library. Falk, Dan. 2014. The Science of Shakespeare: A New Look at the Playwright’s Universe. New York: Thomas Dunne Books (St Martin’s Press). Hamlet’s Lunacy. 2019. Dir. Eric Joris, Mesut Arslan, and Keez Duyves. KVS, Brussels. Live Performances on 10 and 11 April. Immerse UK and Digital Catapult Report. 2019. The Immersive Economy in the UK 2019: The Growth of the Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality Technologies Ecosystem. https://www.immerseuk.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/ The-Immersive-Economy-in-the-UK-Report-2019.pdf. Accessed 30 August 2021. Joris, Eric, and Purni Morell. Hamlet’s Lunacy. 2019. Performance script. Unpublished. Kattenbelt, Chiel. 2021. ‘On Artistic Research, Intermediality and the “Hamlet Encounters” Project.’ In Performing/Transforming. Transgressions and Hybridizations Across Texts, Media, Bodies, edited by Floriana Puglisi, 17–37. Torino: Otto. Kattenbelt, Chiel, and Henk Havens. 2019. ‘URLAND and the Intensification of the Performative.’ In De Internet Trilogie/The Internet Trilogy, edited by URLAND (Ludwig Bindervoet, Thomas Dudkiewicz, Marijn Alexander de Jong, Jimi Zoet), 186–187. Rotterdam: Uitgeverij Karaat.

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Kirby, Michael. 1987. ‘Acting and Not-Acting.’ In A Formalist Theatre, by Michael Kirby, 3–20. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lewis, C. S. 1964. Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mihaylova, Stefka. 2020. ‘Liveness Redux: Radical Performance, Television, and the Truthfulness of Illusion in Bloody Mess by Forced Entertainment.’ Contemporary Theatre Review 30 (3): 340–356. Milgram, Paul, Haruo Takemura, Akira Utsumi, and Fumio Kishino. 1994. ‘Augmented Reality: A Class of Displays on the Reality-Virtuality Continuum.’ Proceedings of SPIE—The International Society for Optical Engineering, Vol. 2351, Telemanipulator and Telepresence Technologies: 282–292. Müller, Heiner. 2001. The Hamletmachine. Translated by Dennis Redmond. http://www.efn.org/~dredmond/Hamletmachine.PDF. Accessed 27 May 2019. Nedelkopoulou, Eirini, Eric Joris, Philippe Bekaert, and Kurt Vanhoutte. 2014. ‘On the Border Between Performance, Science and the Digital: A Conversation with CREW.’ International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 10 (2): 246–254. Nelson, Robin. 2013a. ‘Crew’s Terra Nova: Experiencing Modes of Immersion in Actual-Virtual Space.’ Body, Space & Technology 12: 1–12. Nelson, Robin. 2013b. Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Nelson, Robin. 2022. Practice as Research in the Arts (and Beyond): Principles, Processes, Contexts, Achievements. Second edition. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Schmitt, Carl. 2006. Hamlet or Hecuba: The Irruption of Time into Play. Translated by Simona Draghici. Corvallis, Oregon: Plutarch Press. URLAND. n.d. ‘About.’ https://urland.nl/en/. Accessed 4 September 2021. Vanhoutte, Kurt, and Charlotte Bigg. 2014. ‘On the Border Between Performance, Science and the Digital: The Embodied Orrery.’ International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 10 (2): 255–260. White, R. S. 2015. Avant-Garde Hamlet: Text, Stage, Screen. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Wynants, Nele, Kurt Vanhoutte, and Philippe Bekaert. 2008. ‘Being Inside the Image. Heightening the Sense of Presence in a Video Captured Environment Through Artistic Means: The Case of CREW.’ In PRESENCE 2008. Proceedings of the 11th Annual International Workshop on Presence. Padova 16–18 October 2008, edited by Anna Spagnolli and Luciano Gamberini, 157–162. Padova: CLEUP.

PART III

Traces of Hamlet

CHAPTER 9

Trace

In the last act of Shakespeare’s tragedy, when Hamlet wanders with Horatio through the churchyard, a gravedigger shows him the skull of Yorick. The prince affectionately recalls the jester as a companion of his childhood games: Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio. A fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times, and now how abhorred in my imagination it is. My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your jibes now – your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning, quite chapfallen. (Shakespeare 2007: 5.1.174–182)

Hamlet’s memory of Yorick as a comedian with exceptional imagination and kindness sharply contrasts with the gravedigger’s recollection of a rough clown, known for performing crude jokes (Shakespeare 2007: 5.1.160–171). The contradictory portrayal of Yorick in the play is further reinforced by Hamlet’s ambivalent reaction to the skull. As the prince confronts his happy memories of the jester with the horrifying reality of the bones, he expresses terror mixed with tenderness. The mixture of contrastive images and emotions associated with Yorick coincides with his paradoxical position in the tragedy. Ann Thompson and

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Neil Taylor, the editors of Hamlet for the Third Series of Arden Shakespeare, cited in this book, describe Yorick as ‘one of the most famous characters not to appear in a play’ (Shakespeare 2007: 422; italics added). The jester’s literary fame results from his particular status in Shakespeare’s tragedy, where he functions as a trace, a character suspended between presence and absence. Memories of Yorick are part of prince Hamlet’s childhood and king Hamlet’s reign, so they belong to the past already when the play opens, yet they are still very much present in the mind of the characters. Moreover, in the jester’s portrayal we find traces of two Hamlets, father and son. These traces do not explain much, but they invite important questions about the characters in the play. How did childhood experiences shape prince Hamlet’s relationship with Claudius as his stepfather? Did old Hamlet love his child? Was Yorick a surrogate father for little Hamlet? Yorick’s role in Hamlet invites productive analogies with Hamlet’s position in the adaptations analysed in the following two chapters: Saverio La Ruina’s Kitsch Hamlet and Igor Bauersima’s Factory. While the jester is reduced to bones and recollections in the source tragedy, the prince in these versions is either marginalised or conspicuously absent. In this part of the book, I argue that Hamlet can function dramaturgically as a trace that reveals more by being hidden than by being visible. This is because the prince’s non-appearance creates rupture in the fabric of the adaptation, which in turn strongly influences the audience’s understanding of the action on stage. To elucidate the significance of the trace for deconstructive adaptation, I begin with theorisation of the trace as a tool for theatre analysis and then examine two selected works that exemplify its application.

Trace In Jacques Derrida’s framework of différance, elements not evoked in the process of signification remain as traces that both conceal and reveal the meaning. Traces themselves are not really present in a conventional sense, since for them ‘the language of presence and absence, the metaphysical discourse of phenomenology, is inadequate’ (Derrida 1982: 21). At the same time, Derrida’s discussion of the trace is inscribed in a broader project that critically explores ‘the ontology of presence’ (Derrida

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1982: 21), which encompasses Sigmund Freud’s reflections on the unconscious, Emmanuel Levinas’s considerations of the Other, as well as Martin Heidegger’s theory of Being. Writing about the trace, Derrida emphasises negation and absence, difference and deferral, which he immediately contrasts with their positive counterparts. Inscribing the trace in the architecture of pyramid, he postulates: As rigorously as possible we must permit to appear/disappear the trace of what exceeds the truth of Being. The trace (of that) which can never be presented, the trace which itself can never be presented: that is, appear and manifest itself, as such, in its phenomenon. The trace beyond that which profoundly links fundamental ontology and phenomenology. Always differing and deferring, the trace is never as it is in the presentation of itself. It erases itself in presenting itself, muffles itself in resonating, like the a writing itself, inscribing its pyramid in différance. (1982: 23)

In accordance with his contradictory method of deconstruction, within the passage that is obsessively nihilistic (the word ‘never’ repeated three times, alongside the clauses ‘it erases itself’ or ‘it muffles itself’), Derrida constructs a positive image of a pyramid. He borrows this image from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who used it to refer to the sign in its material form. Expanding on the implications of the pyramid metaphor, Derrida observes: The sign as a monument of life and death, a tomb preserving intact the life of the soul or the embalmed own body entrusted to it, the monument preserving the hegemony of the soul and withstanding the wear of centuries, the monument signifying like a text of stones covered with inscriptions – is the pyramid. And the fact that Hegel uses the word ‘pyramid’ to designate the sign, that he uses this sign, this symbol, or this allegory to signify the sign, that the sign’s signifier here is the pyramid, this fact will be important for us. (1993: 466)

In his critique of Hegel, Derrida associates the pyramid with the notions opposite to those of the trace. With the words like ‘monument’ and ‘preserving’ (repeated twice), he points to stability, solidity, and presence. Simultaneously, however, Derrida underlines the primary function of the

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pyramid—that of a tomb, which evokes death and silence. He demonstrates that the pyramid metaphor exposes irreconcilable contradictions within Hegel’s semiotics, but also within the structure of the sign itself. Discussing the Derridean reception of Hegel, John H. Smith notes ‘the arbitrary and tomblike structure of signifying expression’ that goes unacknowledged in the Hegelian system (1987: 241). According to Smith, Derrida gives a literary reading to Hegel’s ‘metaphor of the pyramidas-signifier,’ in which ‘the sign remains a foreign house of death both entombing and expressing the “living movement” of Hegel’s dialectic’ (1987: 241). In this interpretation death and life are intertwined, while the sign resists the possibility of reconstituting itself into some higher order entity. Since all signs contain traces of absent elements, in deconstructive philosophy the trace itself is also entombed within the metaphor ‘pyramid-as-signifier.’ At the same time, the trace is exhumed in a deconstructive reading, which encourages etymological excavation through the process of producing linguistic and cultural associations. When we look at Hamlet as a sign constructed from other textual, critical, and cultural signs, we find in this tragedy several elements that might function as traces. Hamlet as a character is particularly suitable to occupy this role. Because of his central position in the play and his cultural prominence, Hamlet is a figure that can never fully disappear from adaptations of Shakespeare’s tragedy, even when he is replaced with alternative characters, scenarios, and values. Kitsch Hamlet is titled after Shakespeare’s prince, even if Hamlet fails to be seen or heard on stage. Audience members can only trust that he is indeed present in another room, while they are left to piece together his story from dialogues of other characters and from their own recollections of Shakespeare’s source. In Factory, even if Hamlet’s name has been erased from the play, his legacy continues through Rocky, who repeats his actions, albeit in a different, reality show context. The audience can read Rocky as Hamlet’s palimpsest, drawing on their knowledge of Shakespeare’s plot. In both the adaptations, Shakespeare’s prince functions as an uneasy absence, with his non-appearance weighing over the action on stage. Firmly fixed in our cultural memory, Hamlet cannot be forgotten, but like Yorick, he continues to be remembered, even if imperfectly and partially. It is precisely this state of flawed cultural remembrance that enables the activation of traces in the process of reception, as the audience stitches together half-forgotten and halfremembered elements of the source into a new theatrical fabric. Hamlet’s

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marginalisation or disappearance in this context is not an outcome of the act of adaptation, but its prerequisite. As an iconic play in Western culture, Hamlet lends itself exceptionally well to adaptations that rely on the memory of the audience. In popular imagination, the drama has been associated with a number of quotations and images. Many of its lines have become clichés—their widespread application without proper contextualisation has worn them out and deprived them of deeper meaning. This is because while these quotations circulate in everyday language, their context is often obscure to the users, many of whom might be bitterly disappointed to learn that, according to Shakespeare’s script, Hamlet does not hold the skull in [‘t]o be or not to be’ soliloquy. In consequence, a paradoxical situation develops, in which, on the one hand, Hamlet seems to be universally known, and, on the other hand, it is commonly misquoted and misunderstood. Some elements of the play circulate in abstraction from their original context, or they appear in hybridised contexts, while other elements have become traces in Western cultural memory. Confusion and simplification have become part of Hamlet ’s appropriation in Europe. The long circulation of the tragedy in criticism and culture has made the words and the actions from the play distant from their original context. Associated with multiple and often contrastive meanings, the tragedy has been reduced to a series of quotations and images, which can be easily handled by audiences and critics. Richard Burt refers to these reduced fragments as ‘Shakesbites,’ arguing that they reflect the blurring of the boundary between ‘serious performances and criticism of Shakespeare’ and the ‘tradition dating from the end of the nineteenth century of citing famous “purple passages” from the plays rather than the plays in their entirety’ (2002: 13). He notes that because of the application of Shakesbites, most recently in the form of films excerpts and other visual materials, contemporary Shakespeare criticism has increasingly come to resemble ‘purple passages’ (2002: 14). In Kitsch Hamlet and Factory, snippets from Shakespeare’s tragedy echo the tradition of Shakesbites in that only the most salient elements from the source are selected to be rearranged in an entirely new context. While Shakesbites are characteristic of Shakespeare criticism, they are also symptomatic of a broader connection between cultural memory and forgetfulness. The proliferation of commentaries and artistic appropriations of Shakespeare’s works means that the audiences are asked to remember so much about this tragedy that they begin to reduce and forget the play. This tension between the demands of memory and the

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inevitability of oblivion defines human experience of history in general. In his first novel The Joke, originally published in 1967, Milan Kundera wrote that ‘[t]oday history is no more than a thin thread of the remembered stretching over an ocean of the forgotten, but time moves on, and an epoch of millennia will come which the inextensible memory of the individual will be unable to encompass’ (1992: 293–294). Several decades later, Kundera’s observation is even more relevant. The progress of time over which human experience is amassed results in the reduction and schematisation of that which cannot be fully remembered. At the same time, the advancement of digital technologies leads to exceptional accumulation and transformation of data, which means that not only data itself but also the modes of its preservation and transmission become quickly outdated and obsolete. Digital devices offer us new possibilities of archiving and accessing Shakespeare’s work; however, they also surreptitiously supersede earlier forms of engagement with it. As Burt reminds us in the context of Shakespearean appropriation, new technologies ‘may usefully be theorized in terms of loss,’ since they ‘are always about speed, and therefore are always already about belatedness and obsolescence’ (2002: 8). With VHS tapes being overtaken by DVDs, which in turn have been replaced by file-sharing services, we have seen inevitable loss of data and the need for data conversion, but also new patterns of creating, accessing, and sharing information. Digital technologies and media in particular have allowed for constant proliferation and circulation of data, which is readily available for instant editing and distribution. Multiple versions of Hamlet —textual, theatrical, cinematic etc.—are now freely available in public domain, and they can be easily used as material for further adaptation. At the same time, technology and media developments have often been integrated into the process of Shakespeare adaptation—not only as themes but also as structural devices. The plays examined in this part draw on reality show content and format to capture the experience of twenty-first-century audiences with popular media. They imitate settings, narrative structures, and thematic concerns of television programmes in the style of the long-running Big Brother show. Yet, what is the most important in bringing the two works together here is that they introduce Hamlet as a trace. Kitsch Hamlet features only a few characters and events from the source. Although Hamlet is constantly mentioned in this play, he never speaks nor appears on stage. In Factory, Shakespeare’s scenario is fully reflected in the development of events, yet with no direct allusions in the names of the

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characters or in their dialogues. Both adaptations challenge the perception of Shakespeare’s tragedy as a universal vision of human fate, while discarding a psychologically oriented, Romantic interpretation of the hero. They deconstruct Hamlet as a grand narrative to introduce the eponymous character as an empty signifier rather than a psychological subject. Writing from distinctive social and political perspectives, La Ruina and Bauersima contribute not only to a deconstructive model of adaptation, but also to our understanding of Hamlet’s constant though uneasy presence in contemporary European cultures.

Conclusion Adaptations investigated in this part of the book show how traces might take different forms in a deconstructive model of adaptation. La Ruina includes only a few elements from Hamlet, and it is the eponymous hero who functions as the most disquieting reference to Shakespeare’s tragedy. Bauersima, in turn, reproduces most events from the source play, and the traces of Hamlet underlie the structure of his plot. Illustrating these different possibilities of traces as strategies of adaptation, the two playwrights and directors deconstruct specific aspects of Hamlet. La Ruina juxtaposes the traditional family model and gender-based constructions of madness with Shakespeare’s ideas of family, femininity, and masculinity. Bauersima focuses on the tensions between Shakespeare’s tragedy and the scenarios created by popular culture, exposing the perils of contemporary obsession with celebrity. Both the authors either hide or erase Hamlet to contrast banality with originality, ignorance with knowledge, and kitsch with genius. At the same time, applications of Hamlet as a trace encourage the experimentation with the dramatic form and involve the audience in the process of reconstructing those meanings that are not immediately accessible. The two selected adaptations dramaturgically expand the idea of a character’s non-appearance, which Shakespeare introduced through his portrayal of Yorick. La Ruina makes Hamlet physically absent, whereas Bauersima creates absence on a symbolical level. Structurally, both the playwrights offer a distinctive model of deconstructive adaptation that is centred on an essential gap, a blind spot, from which everything else originates. Thematically, references to Hamlet reveal contradictions and paradoxes in the twenty-first-century culture that is obsessed with media, self-image, and celebrity. Evoking the traces of Shakespeare’s tragedy in

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new contexts, the two selected works confirm its importance for the development of European drama and theatre. They show that Hamlet might be concealed but not cancelled.

References Burt, Richard, ed. 2002. Shakespeare After Mass Media. New York: Palgrave. Derrida, Jacques. 1982. ‘Différance.’ In Margins of Philosophy, by Jacques Derrida, translated by Alan Bass, 1–27. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1993. ‘Speech and Writing According to Hegel.’ In G.W.F. Hegel. Critical Assessments, edited by Robert Stern, 455–477. Vol. 2. Late Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Readings: From British Hegelianism to the Frankfurt School. London and New York: Routledge. Kundera, Milan. 1992. The Joke. Revised translation by Michael Henry Heim, Author, and Aaron Asher. London: Faber and Faber. Shakespeare, William. 2007. Hamlet. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. The Arden Shakespeare. Third Series. London: Thomson Learning. Smith, John H. 1987. ‘U-Topian Hegel: Dialectic and Its Other in Poststructuralism.’ The German Quarterly 60 (2) (Spring): 237–261.

CHAPTER 10

Kitsch Hamlet, Saverio La Ruina

Saverio La Ruina wrote Kitsch Hamlet in 2004, and in the same year the play premiered at Teatro Vascello in Rome, under the playwright’s direction, performed by his theatre company Scena Verticale. The discussion below is based on a published script and a recording of performances on 1 and 2 May 2004. The script is examined alongside the staging, since the two evidence an essential feedback loop between the company and its audience. La Ruina’s acute understanding of the local community and their reality strongly depends on his ability to immediately showcase his plays with Scena Verticale. This allows him to create texts that respond to current social and cultural problems. As a playwright, dramaturg, actor, and director, La Ruina has explored such thorny topics in the Italian public life as femicide in Polvere (2015), homophobia in masculu e fiammina (2016), and islamophobia in Mario e Saleh (2019). At the same time, in his Calabrian-Shakespearean trilogy, which includes Hardore di Otello (2000) and Amleto ovvero Cara Mammina (2002), together with Kitsch Hamlet, he has delved into the lives of his protagonists in the Italian South. Kitsch Hamlet discards the most praised features of its tragic source, such as the greatness of the tragic hero, the complexity of philosophical problems, and the intricacies of poetic language. Most importantly, it discards the eponymous hero himself. When the Italian Hamlet does not appear in front of the audience, his rude and ruthless brothers take his © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Mancewicz, Hamlet after Deconstruction, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96806-9_10

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place, filling the stage with trivial chatter. According to Roberta Sanna’s review for La Nuova Sardegna, the hero’s disappearance produces the ‘absence of doubts, disdain, and action’ (Rassegna stampa). What emerges instead is a banal and unreflective flow of family conversations and rituals, complemented by meaningless prattle from reality show programmes. There is no consistent plot, no exploration of complex individual stories. What the play offers instead is a revealing insight into everyday life in a provincial community that is suffocated by patriarchal values, economic troubles, and dull scenarios from popular television. In his grim portrayal of a small, Calabrian town with its economic and social difficulties, La Ruina diverges from a long line of Hamlet readings, particularly Romantic and post-Romantic ones, which interpreted this tragedy as a universal expression of human genius with philosophical and poetic significance. Eliminating the most famous part in theatre history, he also goes against the nineteenth- and twentieth-century tradition of mattatori, that is star-actors dominating Italian stages with their declamatory, larger-than-life performances. It is no coincidence that some of the most famous mattatori, like Ernesto Rossi and Tommaso Salvini in the nineteenth century, or Memo Benassi and Vittorio Gassman in the twentieth century, were renowned for playing Hamlet (Mancewicz 2014: 297–298). The prince’s part—unusually long, emotionally intense, and intellectually complex—is still one of the most coveted in Western theatre, among male and female performers alike. La Ruina’s gesture of removing the eloquent and charismatic hero from the stage is thus inherently anti-Romantic in terms of his adaptation’s dramatic and theatrical potential. It also points to Kitsch Hamlet ’s ambiguous relationship with tragedy as a genre, signalling a shift towards contemporary models of culture and entertainment. The following analysis focuses on theoretical and social issues. I argue that traces function in this adaptation as markers of a deconstructive approach and as elements that contribute to the play’s portrayal of a small stifling community, with its conservative views on family, gender, and madness.

Tragedy and Burlesque According to La Ruina, the absence of Hamlet from his play determines the relationship between the source and the adaptation, illustrating ‘the impossibility of the tragic in contemporary society’ (La Ruina 2006b). As the playwright provocatively argues, ‘[t]oday, here, there is no space for

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Hamlet, for Shakespeare. Who could understand his words?’ (Rassegna stampa). His observation is echoed in the reviews of Italian critics, such as Magda Poli and Claudia Canella, both writing for Corriere della Sera (Rassegna stampa). Similarly, Renato Palazzi in an online article for www.delteatro.it notes that ‘it almost seems that the Shakespearean plot has been cancelled, pressed through a meat grinder of subculture which has not even left a trace or memory of it’ (Rassegna stampa; italics added). Such views are understandable, given the ignorance and degradation of Kitsch Hamlet ’s characters. And yet the play’s title unmistakably points to Shakespeare’s tragedy, whereas Hamlet’s withdrawal is frequently discussed even if ultimately unresolved. There are also several parallels in the plot that closely link Kitsch Hamlet with Hamlet, such as the return of the eponymous protagonist from the studies abroad and his subsequent melancholy, the madness of young lovers, and the impact of a public performance (in this case a film showing) on a specific audience member. La Ruina carefully selects those protagonists and themes from Shakespeare’s plot that allow him to focus on social problems that are the most prominent in the South of Italy, the so-called Mezzogiorno. His representation of the source as a trace showcases the potential of deconstruction as a model of social critique. At the same time, the title makes it evident that this is a new version of Shakespeare’s drama, with a new kind of Hamlet, who is localised in the conversations of his family members. They call him Amleto, though I will refer to him as Hamlet for consistency with the play’s title and the rest of the book. As for the concept of ‘kitsch,’ it introduces an antiheroic perspective and signals an ironic approach to the source. Indeed, La Ruina provides a hyperrealist and almost caricatured account of social ills in the South, vividly capturing its contradictions and conflicts. Like many examples examined in the book, this adaptation draws on burlesque, a genre which, as John D. Jump notes, originated from Italy, where it flourished between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century (1972: 72). Moreover, the play echoes the tradition of Shakespearean burlesques, which, according to Manfred Draudt, were popular on the Continent and in England from the end of the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century (1998: 64). Burlesque influence on Kitsch Hamlet consists in the simplification of the plot, the inclusion of the local context through the setting and dialect, debasement of language, and the ironic commentary on contemporary culture. Since La Ruina selects only a few episodes from Shakespeare’s

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tragedy, he creates a simple and schematic action. Burlesque is also inscribed in the portrayal of a provincial community and a traditional Italian family. La Ruina’s stage production further foregrounds local aspects by introducing material and immaterial elements that characterise the Calabrian region, such as unfinished architecture of the family house and heart-rending folklore songs performed by Ophelia (known as Ofelia in the script but referred to as Ophelia in the chapter). Most importantly, the production of the play gives audiences a rare opportunity to hear the rhythms and pulses of the Calabrian dialect on stage. As Mariateresa Surianello notes, while texts in Neapolitan and Sicilian dialects are frequently performed across the country, Calabrian dialect is much less common in theatre (2006: 8). This might explain why La Ruina translated his work into standard Italian, instead of keeping it in Calabrian, when he submitted it to the Ugo Betti competition for the best Italian drama. The colloquial and dialectal language of the adaptation sharply contrasts with the poetic diction of the source play. While Hamlet contains speeches and dialogues that are renowned for their exquisite style, rich imagery, and profound ideas, La Ruina relies on clichés and colloquial expressions. The protagonists repeat political and pop culture slogans, speaking in a banal and vulgar manner. The playwright describes the language of his characters as ‘mute,’ since it ‘expresses only what the group already knows, and which it never interrogates’ (2006b). A mute language keeps the group together, but only as long as its members are willing to forsake their own identity, curiosity, and critical thinking. Antiindividual and anti-intellectual, this is a language of commercial media, capitalist ideology, and populist propaganda. In the twenty-first century, it has infiltrated public spheres in many European countries, contributing to the polarisation of political attitudes and social relations. In portraying alarming effects of this process, La Ruina provides the audience with a highly perceptive and a deeply depressing social critique. References to Hamlet allow him to expand on the current crisis of values, but they also introduce a tragic undercurrent. In Kitsch Hamlet, there is always a sense of pending disaster, of personal and social failure that cannot be averted, of ignorance and frustration which discolour and deform everything. Surianello, in her review for tuttoteatro.com, notes that in Kitsch Hamlet the criticism of an intellectual and their ability to improve society is even more radical than in Heiner Müller’s The Hamletmachine (Rassegna stampa). Although La Ruina’s adaptation is not as dramaturgically inventive and

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innovative as its German predecessor, it is more pessimistic in its denial of a broader historical and philosophical perspective. Provincial and claustrophobic in its narrow focus, it showcases three young men who are not only economically and socially inactive, but who also fail to reflect on their inactivity as articulately as Shakespeare’s or Müller’s Hamlets. La Ruina’s aim to demonstrate the impossibility of tragedy today leads him thus towards a different kind of tragedy—certainly less glamourous but perhaps even more gloomy. This is a tragedy of rising unemployment rates, physical and psychological abuse of women, and provincial poverty—both economic and cultural. In this scenario, it is not a noble hero who suffers, but a whole society. Consequently, even if the playwright effectively downplays the serious tone and the dignified style of Shakespeare’s source, his adaptation never fully loses its connection with tragedy as a mode of capturing the anguish and sorrow of people living in a particular historical moment. Some reviewers acknowledge this connection in their terminology. For instance, Nicola Viesti from Corriere Del Mezzogiorno describes Kitsch Hamlet as ‘a Calabrian-shakespearean tragedy,’ whereas Ugo Ronfani from Il Giorno as ‘a tragicomedy in a grotesque form’ (Rassegna stampa). Others remind us that the play is the last, and according to Gian Maria Tosatti’s review for www.lif egate.it, the most comprehensive instalment in La Ruina’s CalabrianShakespearean trilogy (Rassegna stampa). The trilogy testifies to the playwright’s fascination with Shakespeare’s tragedies, which he has used to examine contemporary frustrations, anxieties, and aspirations. La Ruina’s treatment of tragedy is central to his deconstructive agenda. What distinguishes his approach to the source is his ability to remove Shakespeare’s tragic framework in a way that a tragic meaning can still remain as a trace underneath the modern script. As Surianello argues, ‘behind the light appearance of this piece there is a hidden tragic substance, a profound protest against the raging decomposition of our society’ (2006: 10). In a similar manner, Titti Danese describes Shakespeare’s influence on La Ruina’s trilogy in a review for Sipario, where she notes how ‘Shakespearean themes […] remain […] always more in the background, a little more than a suggestion, and yet capable of feeding the extraordinary creativity of Saverio La Ruina and his actors’ (Rassegna stampa). Both Surianello and Danese use the spatial imagery of the foreground and the background to focus on the distinction between what is manifestly present in the play and what cannot be immediately seen. Their accounts point to the invisible elements of Kitsch Hamlet, to what

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is concealed and needs to be uncovered. As such, their rhetoric evokes Derrida’s descriptions of trace. Indeed, the concept of the trace is fundamental here in its ability to represent a uniquely subtle, at times almost imperceptible relationship between the source and its adaptation. It is also crucial for acknowledging how the foreground and the background work together in an intricate dialogue of correspondences and contrasts. In Kitsch Hamlet, this dialogue develops in the context of a provincial Calabrian setting and its socio-economic framework.

Setting and Design When in October 2005 Kitsch Hamlet was nominated for the prestigious Premio Ugo Betti [Ugo Betti Award], the verdict of the jury emphasised its contemporary character: A Hamlet which is never seen in a meridional, contemporary, and realistic version. Hamlet does not speak; he wants to see only his mother, and he is out of his wits since the departure to complete a ‘Master’ in England. His three brothers are typical contemporary youths in their twenties: rough, dishevelled, and violent, but they are also mummy’s boys attached to the idea of decorum and family order. The appeal of the text lies in the horrible yet coherent portrait of the three messengers of violence; it is a portrait we all know. (Scena Verticale website)

The account focuses on two qualities that are crucial to the play’s success: its uniqueness and familiarity. On the one hand, the play presents Shakespeare’s tragedy in a new and surprising form by reconfiguring the family dynamics. On the other hand, it relies on the common experience of the audience, since as ‘the portrait we all know’ it reflects on the conditions of life in the South of Italy at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In this play, La Ruina takes a close look at provincial Calabria. Since the author does not mention any geographical names, the action may be happening in any village or a small town in the region. The drama’s locale could be identified with Castrovillari, a town of about twenty-two thousand inhabitants and the seat of Scena Verticale. The stage directions describe the unfinished and dilapidated state of the house in which the action takes place as characteristic of Mediterranean architecture (La Ruina 2006a: 19). A single wall facing the audience and sparse furniture represent the interior of a living room, which abounds in flowers, candles,

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and holy images, particularly those of Padre Pio, a friar and mystic active in the first half of the twentieth century in the southern region of Apulia, canonised in 2002 as San Pio da Pietrelcina. The overall design is marked by popular religion and kitsch aesthetics. The dominant atmosphere is that of decay, frustration, and boredom. The time of action can be established with precision as 2004 by tracing references to popular culture in the text. The characters passionately argue about the Italian version of the reality show Big Brother, especially about the fourth edition, which they may still follow on the Italian television. Since the show began in Italy in 2000 and recommenced every year, it is easy to calculate the timeframe of the play. The year 2004 is also when Kitsch Hamlet was written and staged for the first time, which further testifies to its contemporary character. Moreover, there are significant similarities between the scenario of Big Brother and the action of Kitsch Hamlet concerning the setting and the behaviour of the characters. In La Ruina’s drama, the action takes place exclusively in the living room, with three men sitting on a sofa, playing with their mobile phones, quarrelling about trivial issues, sharing obscene jokes, repeating pop slogans, and discussing television programmes. All this sounds familiar to the fans of the Big Brother format. However, what is different in the play is the framing of the characters and the action for the audience. Contrary to Big Brother, where the participants are discussed and judged by the Big Brother figure and the programme host, in Kitsch Hamlet there is no explicitly stated evaluation of the protagonists and the events, but instead La Ruina carefully curates the presentation of the brothers’ reality. The three young men not only dominate the stage, but also the dialogue; they are the principal source of information for the audience, who follows the events from their perspective. Finally, the contemporary nature of the play is reflected in La Ruina’s realistic portrayal of a Mediterranean family and society. More specifically, constructing relationships between the characters, the playwright situates them within economic and social conditions of life in the South. Statistical data consistently shows a significant and increasing divide between the North and the South of Italy, which concerns economic, cultural, and social factors. Since 2004, the rate of unemployment in Mezzogiorno has been almost twice as high as the rate of unemployment in the rest of Italy, with the gap widening since 2012 (Marinuzzi and Tortorella 2020). In 2004, 40% of young people in Calabria were unemployed in contrast to 22% of youth unemployment in Northern and Central Italy (ISTAT

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2013). What is particularly striking, in 2004, 18.7% of the population in the South was identified as ‘inactive, available for work but not looking actively for employment,’ as opposed to only 3.6% of ‘inactive’ population in the North, with the numbers growing to 27.2% in the South and 4.5% in the North in 2011 (ISTAT 2013). The brothers in Kitsch Hamlet manifestly belong to this ‘inactive’ group; they are fit for work yet idle. La Ruina describes them as ‘available,’ with the idea that being always at disposal renders them disposable, so that they can easily become victims of a greater force and their own ignorance (2006b). At the same time, since in the South the local economy exhibits signs of decay, young people tend to live at home long into their adulthood, with the family often having to fill the gaps left by the state.

Family Family is fundamental in Kitsch Hamlet in that it organises the relationships between the characters. At once supportive and repressive, it provides the basic social structure for its members. All characters in the play, excluding Ophelia, belong to one family, which is comprised of mother and four sons. Only three brothers, however, appear on stage and engage in dialogue: Enzo, Giovanni, and Giuseppe (played by Dario de Luca, Giovanni Spina, and Fabio Pellicori respectively) while the fourth one, Hamlet, remains isolated in a separate room. The mother (played by Rosario Mastrota) is a recurrent character on stage, while the father is never mentioned and remains conspicuously absent. Consequently, the relationship between the mother and the sons is the most prominent; even the interactions between the brothers heavily depend on their relation to the mother, as they compete for her affection and care. Enzo, Giovanni, and Giuseppe express a kind of mentality that is stereotypically associated with young men in the Mediterranean region: while they pose as machos in the treatment of women, they are, in fact, mammoni (mummy’s boys). The three brothers, ‘attached to the idea of decorum and family order,’ to quote Premio Ugo Betti’s jury again, fiercely defend their domestic status quo. Enzo forcefully announces that ‘the family is everything’ (2006a: 33–34), and he disapproves of Hamlet, whose sudden change of behaviour has disrupted the household routine. The brothers emphasise the necessity of rituals and everyday customs. For instance, Enzo points to the importance of shared meals as an occasion when all family members can be united at the table. Nevertheless, while the protagonists

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insist on maintaining external signs of the union, they fail to support their family in a substantial manner: they do not contribute financially to the household, they refuse to assist the mother with domestic duties, and they deny help to their alienated brother. Although they are healthy and grown up, the brothers completely depend on their mother, who provides them with accommodation, food, and money for personal expenses. We soon learn that the protagonists usually spend their days watching television or working out in the gym, justifying their unemployment with the economic crisis. It is evident, however, that the three men lack the will and motivation to search for a job, expecting their mother to support them. Meanwhile, the mother—as an example of a stereotypical Italian mamma—is too protective and caring to allow her sons to become independent. She treats the adult men as if they were helpless children, and rather than putting demands on them, she satisfies their needs. The mother moves in a wheelchair, which emphasises her housebound status. Despite her disability and advanced age, she manages the whole household by herself. When entering the stage, she regularly brings food and drinks for the sons. The young men make no effort to help her with domestic duties, making it clear that they are used to being served and provided for. Played by a male actor and upholding male privilege, the mother extends and ensures the functioning of patriarchy in the play. The action of Kitsch Hamlet, however, is not limited to the presentation of three Italian mummy’s boys, since the traces of Hamlet introduce a tragic undertone. References to Shakespeare complicate La Ruina’s action and the interpretation of his characters. Against the background of a traditional family structure and contemporary media culture, the focus on Hamlet and Ophelia serves to accentuate the themes of violence, madness, and gender.

Hamlet La Ruina’s Hamlet has no voice and no agency in this play. In order to understand this character and his story, the audience has to rely on the descriptions of others. The protagonist is portrayed by his family as the most intelligent of the brothers, the one who went to England to complete his Master’s studies. When he returns home, his future seems bright and secure. It is thus surprising that Hamlet shuts himself in a room, refusing to speak to anyone. While the mother lovingly takes care

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of him, the three brothers continue to ridicule him and wonder about his astonishing alienation. They refuse to acknowledge that their brother’s transformation might be related to them having raped his fiancée, Ophelia. This brief summary shows how in Kitsch Hamlet the title protagonist is forced to face the degradation of his family upon his return. Such development of action closely follows Hamlet. In both cases, in the absence of the eponymous heroes, the integrity of their families is shattered, because their closest family members betray their trust. The stories of the two Hamlets can be seen as a metaphorical representation of how our perceptions of ourselves, our families, and our communities might dramatically change following life-transforming events, such as bereavement and trauma, particularly when these events coincide with landmark experiences, such as reaching adulthood, completing education, or migration. Both Hamlets undergo all these experiences and eventually find themselves in unexpected and incomprehensible situations, from which they are unable to escape. Abhorred by the crimes committed by their closest relatives, Shakespeare’s and La Ruina’s Hamlets are unable to choose a clear course of action. In Kitsch Hamlet, when the eponymous character returns from England, he most likely learns about the rape of his fiancée, yet instead of punishing the brothers and comforting Ophelia, he locks himself up in silence. La Ruina takes Hamlet’s solitude to extremes, as the protagonist remains alone in the room, visited only by the mother. Quiet and passive, the Italian protagonist refuses to communicate with his family. In the context of the Mediterranean culture, where verbal expression is deeply entrenched in social interactions and where family relations are close, his silence makes him particularly eccentric and incomprehensible. Most importantly, however, it leaves open the question why this Hamlet has changed after his return home—the question, which continues to puzzle his brothers and his mother. The brothers repeatedly raise the issue of Hamlet’s surprising metamorphosis, which might suggest that they are sincerely concerned about his wellbeing. Under closer scrutiny, however, it turns out that they do not want to acknowledge what they have done, but rather they try to convince the mother and, indirectly, the audience, about their innocence. Meanwhile the mother perceives Hamlet’s behaviour as another proof of his genius, and to her his life ‘seems like a novel,’ which should be awarded with the Nobel Prize (2006a: 50). The effect of her admiration is bitterly ironic, not only because the mother cannot distinguish between life and literature, but also because

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she is incapable of realising that Hamlet’s behaviour is escapist rather than heroic. Despite never appearing on stage, Hamlet remains present in the conversations of the characters. He is also symbolically evoked by two physical objects that, ironically, further foreground his absence: a door at the centre and a coffin lid brought by Ophelia. Both objects have contradictory functions in the performance and become powerful reminders of Hamlet’s status as a trace in this adaptation. The door is centrally located in front of the audience and surrounded by religious images; it provides both a threshold and a barrier to Hamlet’s bedroom. The room is never shown to the audience, but it plays an important role—it conceals the title protagonist, and it metaphorically stands for a complex world of Shakespeare’s tragedy that is hidden from the spectators. The room is thus at once a symbol of Hamlet and his story. Only once during the performance the mother quietly visits Hamlet, but we neither hear nor see this meeting. Moving between the onstage living room and the offstage bedroom, the mother is the only character who crosses the border between visible and invisible worlds of the play though she is unable to bring them together. Because we do not gain much insight into the protagonist’s story, the door that separates him from others, and that functions as the only material manifestation of both his presence and absence, invites diverse responses from the characters. A simple and unassuming object, it is open to a range of actions and associations. As Andrew Sofer shows in his brilliant book The Stage Life of Props (2003), it is often such plain objects as a handkerchief or a fan that can function in a powerfully evocative way on stage and activate multiple meanings. Repeatedly during Scena Verticale’s performance, the door in Kitsch Hamlet is at the centre of the action, provoking different feelings in the characters and framing their conflicts. It is a recurrent topic in their conversations and a symbol of the protagonists’ troubled relationships with Hamlet. For the characters, the door stands for Hamlet himself, because this is where they tend to address their grievances and pleas to the absent hero. For instance, Enzo angrily bangs at the door to express his frustration with the intellectual and educated elite, which his graduate sibling represents and to which he himself does not belong. By contrast, for Ophelia, the closed door is both an actual obstacle to see Hamlet and a symbol of her inability to emotionally re-connect with her fiancé. It is also a sign of her lost opportunity to marry and settle within her local community.

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During her visits, Ophelia tries to open the door and force her presence into Hamlet’s room, yet each time the brothers deny her entry. A series of carefully choreographed confrontations between the girl and the three young men—confrontations which are at once physically intense and aesthetically compelling—produces a continuous re-enactment of the lovers’ separation. The second object that stands for Hamlet on stage is a coffin lid brought by Ophelia. Unable to reach her lover, the heroine introduces this object as a symbol of her devotion, although she also uses it as a battering ram, a weapon, and a shield—all at once. All these functions point to Ophelia’s antagonistic relationship with the brothers. However, when addressing Hamlet, Ophelia caresses the lid and speaks to it with such affection that she seems to be almost bringing Hamlet to life. The choice of a coffin lid as a symbol of life and love is paradoxical but then also perfectly apt for an adaptation which places an absent protagonist at its centre. It is a striking symbol of how this Hamlet can never be fully present, and how we are constantly invited to search for his supplements and substitutions, always in the process of inventing our own versions of his story. Our pre-knowledge of the source is critical in this process, particularly in adaptations like Kitsch Hamlet, where crucial material from the source is withheld from the audience. Deprived of language and bodily presence on stage, evoked in recollections of others, this Hamlet can only function as a trace. As such, he gives us an insight both into Shakespeare’s tragedy and La Ruina’s drama. An image of Hamlet that transpires from the characters’ memories mirrors their own views and values. What emerges is a figure deprived of dignity and magnitude, passive and unfulfilled, trapped in the limitations and prejudices of a provincial mindset. La Ruina describes Shakespeare’s protagonists as ‘figures of great dramatic weight, capable of expressing profound thought, gigantic sentiments, and auto-critical capacities;’ he contrasts them with his own characters, who are ‘mediocre “heroes,” ordinary and shabby, completely unconscious of who they are and where they are going, lost and with no possibility of redemption’ (2006b). The inactivity of La Ruina’s Hamlet ultimately makes him similar to Enzo, Giovanni, and Giuseppe, who refuse to assume serious responsibilities and face the world. All the brothers in Kitsch Hamlet, regardless of their education and character, depend on the mother and refuse to become independent. Against the passivity of the four brothers, La Ruina

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introduces Ophelia as an angry, active woman who violates all the expectations and norms of her community. It is Ophelia who takes on the role of avenger, which has been abandoned by Hamlet. In doing so, she challenges the patriarchal order and indirectly questions the position of Hamlet as a hero.

Ophelia Portraying Ophelia, La Ruina shows her madness as a form of rebellion and her aggressive behaviour as a way of confronting her abusers. Both in Hamlet and Kitsch Hamlet, Ophelia is defined by her relationship to powerful men. In Shakespeare’s tragedy, the heroine appears for the first time in a domestic context, and her conversation with Laertes and Polonius foregrounds her submission to both these characters. Ophelia’s identity depends on being the daughter of Polonius, the sister of Laertes, and the fiancée of Hamlet, the prince of Denmark. Significantly, all these relations evoke the notion of hierarchy, determine social position of Ophelia, and influence her behaviour in public. The submission of the heroine is further reinforced by the patronising attitude that the male characters demonstrate towards her. Before leaving for France, Laertes reprimands his sister for her affection towards Hamlet (Shakespeare 2007: 1.3.5–51); soon after, Polonius instructs the girl how to behave towards her lover and demands absolute obedience to himself (Shakespeare 2007: 1.3.89–135). Finally, Hamlet repudiates Ophelia in a deeply distressing scene, in which he criticises the way in which she and other women look and behave (Shakespeare 2007: 3.1.89–148). Given her dependence on others in Shakespeare’s tragedy, it is not surprising that Ophelia was initially seen in theatre as a minor character. Even though, unlike Fortinbras, she did not tend to be so easily eliminated from adaptations of the play, at the beginning her position was seen as secondary. According to Marvin Rosenberg, ‘until major actresses seized on the role, it was regarded as a rather insignificant accessory to Hamlet’ (1992: 236). Similarly, Elaine Showalter notes the crucial contribution of female performers, who underlined the importance of the part, ‘When Shakespeare’s heroines began to be played by women instead of boys, the presence of the female body and female voice, quite apart from details of interpretation, created new meanings and subversive tensions in these roles, and perhaps most importantly with Ophelia’ (1985: 80).

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Once women were able to act, they not only introduced nuances of character analysis, but they could also make political statements about the nature of female presence on stage and in public sphere more broadly. In Kitsch Hamlet, through the portrayal of Ophelia, La Ruina explores the social and cultural standing of women in Italy. His adaptation represents female dependence as crudely as its source, as men determine the position of women by putting them into one of two categories: mistresses on the one hand, or wives and mothers on the other. As Hamlet’s fiancée, Ophelia belonged to the latter category, the one seen as more respectable, yet the brothers’ rape irrevocably excluded her from it. Since sexual violence in Kitsch Hamlet occurs on the beach and is subsequently shown on a cinema screen for the local audience, the girl is exposed to public humiliation and shaming. Moreover, with her marriage prospects damaged, in the eyes of her provincial community she functions as a sexual object of male fantasies. La Ruina’s Ophelia is aware of that, and she changes her appearance and behaviour according to her new status. It is striking though that in Scena Verticale’s production of the play the sexualisation of Ophelia is more an act of imagination on the part of Hamlet’s brothers than an accurate reflection of the girl’s appearance. Before Ophelia enters, Giovanni mentions high-heeled shoes and a revealing skirt as her usual outfit, yet when the girl actually arrives on the stage of Teatro Vascello, she is barefoot and dressed in a way that is quite ordinary. Only her smudged and exaggerated makeup suggests that the heroine might be in distress. It is thus shocking that Enzo states that to him the girl ‘seems a whore’ (2006a: 22), adding that he would never allow his fiancée to dress like her. The brothers’ damning judgement of Ophelia reflects their own preconceptions, as well as their compulsive need to confine women in a narrow and restrictive framework of patriarchal expectations. The description of Ophelia as a ‘whore’ in the play exposes a widespread system of female oppression that aims to censor and constrain women’s behaviour and appearance. Maggie O’Neill observes that ‘“the whore stigma” […] is transferable to all women, but particularly to those who transgress the rules and norms that “control” women morally and socially’ (2000: 186). As a value judgement, it is derogatory and denigrating, while it is also gender-specific in its explicit focus on female sexuality and female bodies as objects of strict social scrutiny. Women seeking to assert themselves as agents in control of their own sexuality or simply going against the norms imposed on them by society become

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objectified and sexualised in public as a consequence. In the case of La Ruina’s Ophelia, this process is multi-layered and dynamic. First, the girl is raped by three men that she knew and trusted; then she is humiliated in public when the video of the incident is shown at a summer party, and finally, she continues to be shamed and gaslighted by her abusers, who deny any wrongdoing. All these layers reveal the comprehensive and widespread nature of victimisation of women. It is now widely recognised that sexual violence survivors are frequently subject to further psychological abuse, including social shaming and blaming. The psychological and social repercussions of Ophelia’s abuse become apparent when the brothers present a video recording of the rape to their friends, taking pride in their deed. The screening of the incident vaguely evokes the inner performance in Hamlet. In La Ruina’s play, the three brothers show the film record of their crime, testing the reactions of the audience, particularly Ophelia. In the spirit of the times, the Italian playwright not only changes the medium of the public performance, replacing a theatrical show with an amateur video, but he also rearranges relationships between the characters. In Shakespeare’s tragedy, Hamlet and Horatio closely observe Claudius to discover if he is guilty, whereas in La Ruina’s drama, Enzo, Giovanni, and Giuseppe are the villains who take pleasure in watching the reactions of their victim and the audience. This shift of perspectives is telling, since it corresponds to the prevalent and perverse voyeurism of postmodern culture, which largely owes to such reality shows as Big Brother, and the subsequent boom of social media platforms. Contemporary media and technologies offer almost unlimited possibilities of looking into the lives of others, transforming our understanding of privacy and intimacy. At the same time, the fact that the three brothers do not recognise their guilt, and that they publicly brag about the rape foreshadows the brutality of social media in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Since Kitsch Hamlet was staged, a fierce competition for online attention, which can directly translate into financial gain, has resulted in the proliferation of extreme images and videos that break social taboos and blur ethical boundaries. Although Kitsch Hamlet is immersed in the culture of commercial television of the turn of the millennium rather than social media of the second decade of the twenty-first century, it prefigures the mechanisms of female sexualisation and commodification that have become prevalent online. La Ruina shows the widespread and blatant objectification of female bodies as assets that are exploited to draw audiences and increase

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advertising revenues. This phenomenon is deeply established in cultural history and tradition. Danielle Hipkins argues that ‘a preoccupation with female performance and prostitution has in fact defined Italian culture since the Second World War,’ with the focus on female appearance leading to the development of ‘the beauty myth’ (2011: 413). The myth means that women tend to be seen in the public sphere as bodies on display— bodies that are constantly judged and criticised for their appearance. Indeed, the cult of female beauty has become a measure for restraining the behaviour of women and undermining their self-worth and value. In The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women (1990), Naomi Wolf famously argues that the pressures on women to adhere to unrealistic standards of attractiveness have increased in response to their growing social and political power. In this context, it might be argued that the historical obsession with virginity, so evident in Renaissance dramas such as Hamlet, has been translated in the twentieth and the twenty-first century into the cult of a beautiful female body. Both the phenomena, in fact, are means of instrumentalising and controlling women. With religious principles of sexual chastity giving way to capitalist pressures to purchase beauty products and services, purity has been replaced by perfection. As part of this process, female bodies have become new kinds of commodities, exploited first by cinema and television, and then by social media. The phenomenon has been exceptionally prominent in Italy, where audiences have experienced ‘the particular and excessive objectification of women,’ which ‘has come around through the competition resulting from the deregulation of Italian television, and the expansion of Berlusconi’s media empire’ (Hipkins 2011: 415–416). Rising to prominence as a politician and a well-connected entrepreneur, Silvio Berlusconi became a key figure in the privatisation and commercialisation of Italian television. Between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s, he established ownership of three out of six Italian national channels (Canale 5, Italia 1, and Rete 4), and he took control of three national TV networks (tele + 1, tele + 2, and tele + 3), holding six out of twelve principal TV networks (Barile and Rao 1992: 263–264). His media empire was not limited to television, since his company Finivest ‘also owned or had control of Publitalia, a major advertising network, national radio station, a national newspaper (Il Giornale), several magazines, a film company, a recording company, Mondadori, Italy’s largest publishing house, and five cinemas’ (Mitchell 1996: 15).

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It is Berlusconi-run television that became mainly responsible for a large-scale social and cultural revolution in Italy, which set standards for popular entertainment and news consumption. Italia 1 and then Canale 5 were the first to introduce the velina figure, in the programme Striscia la Notizia, which commenced in 1988 and established the presence of a young, attractive woman who would appear alongside a male presenter to showcase her beauty and perform a silly joke, a song, or a dance, in order to provide light interval in between more serious content. Canale 5 is also the channel that transmitted Big Brother to Italian audiences every year from 2000 to the present. It has paved way for numerous reality show formats that would populate Italian TV channels and promote seasonal celebrities as part of ongoing commercialisation of the Italian television. The impact of television’s commercialisation has been enormous, particularly in its institutionalisation of misogyny. Describing the effects of deregulation, which occurred back in 1976, Umberto Eco identified a shift from public ‘Paleo-TV’ to private ‘Neo-TV’ in the 1980s. Amongst many characteristics of this new kind of television, he distinguished its provincialism and then, almost accidentally, its sexism. Paleo-TV wanted to be a window that looked out from the most far-flung provinces onto the wide world. Independent Neo-TV (starting from the state model of ‘It’s a Knock-Out’) points the TV cameras on the provinces, and shows the public of Piacenza the people of Piacenza – which has gathered together to listen to a Piacenza watchmaker’s advertisement, while a Piacenza presenter makes coarse jokes about the ‘tits’ of a Piacenza woman, who takes it all uncomplainingly so that she can be seen by the public of Piacenza while she wins a pressure-cooker. It’s like looking through the telescope from the wrong end. Nothing like that boring ‘Hamlet’ stuff. (1984: 23)

What is striking in this account is the public acceptance of sexualisation and humiliation of women in the media that accompanies the turn of television towards banal and provincial topics. It is also noteworthy that Eco explicitly contrasts trivial media content with grand tragedies like Hamlet, which he provocatively describes as ‘boring.’ In Kitsch Hamlet, we observe all the phenomena identified by Eco in the passage above: a story of one family in provincial Calabria, an attempt to normalise sexism, and traces of Hamlet as a play whose heroic style does not fit with contemporary times. Thirty years after Eco’s article, La Ruina depicts devastating consequences of television’s deregulation, which has allowed

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Berlusconi-run media company, Mediaset (controlled by Finivest), not only to gain unprecedented power over the Italian commercial television but also to infiltrate public channels with its content, aesthetics, and marketing strategies. This observation is confirmed by the report Women and Media in Europe, commissioned by the Fondazione Censis (an institute for socio-economic research) in 2006, so shortly after the staging and the publication of Kitsch Hamlet. The report notes that in Italy ‘[w]omen in television are often protagonists of a represented situation or an event, but much less frequently presenters (10.3%)’ (2006: 3). Consequently, they have limited opportunities; ‘space offered to female figures is thus ample, but generally “managed” by a male figure: they have gained roles that are always more central, but nevertheless remain mostly “supporting,” in relation to a “principal” male figure’ (2006: 3). As Hipkins fittingly summarises the marginalisation and misrepresentation of women, ‘Private and state Italian television has failed to observe its own ethical codes of conduct, national and international law regarding the representation of women’ (2011: 416). To address this issue, Lorella Zanardo, an Italian women’s rights activist, has launched a widespread campaign against the misogynist portrayal of women on the Italian television, which has resulted in a highly popular documentary, Il Corpo delle Donne [The Body of Women], available on YouTube (2009), and in an inexpensive paperback book under the same title published by Feltrinelli (2010). In both these popular formats, Zanardo has exposed the media obsession with female beauty and youth, which has put pressure on women to surgically alter their bodies and sexualise their appearance in order to gain public visibility and approval. In light of discriminatory media practices, it is chilling to consider that low-brow TV programmes are still sources of information about the world and social behaviour for a large population of viewers. In Kitsch Hamlet, the formative role of the TV is even made explicit when Enzo orders Giuseppe to ‘[w]atch television and learn something’ (2006a: 27). Unfortunately, for the three brothers television is limited to the most popular reality shows and blockbuster movies. Surianello eloquently describes the protagonists’ daily viewing diet as a ‘chatter […] that demonstrates the degradation of values and the triumph of consumerism fed by false myths which our worst television spits every day’ (2006: 11). She also makes a direct link between the brothers’ engagement with consumer culture and their treatment of Ophelia, when she notes that the heroine is ‘devoured’

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by the three men as ‘foolish consumers’ (2006: 12). The characters’ misogyny and their obsession with female bodies reflect thus not only local codes of a small patriarchal community but also national trends established by commercial cinema and television, which have been subsequently absorbed and augmented by the global networks of social media. At the same time, the abusive treatment of Ophelia is exacerbated by the widespread access to cheap devices for producing and sharing videos, which has enabled the brothers to record the rape and show it to the members of the local community against the girl’s will. Despite the systematic nature of female abuse in the play, however, Ophelia’s dishevelled appearance on the stage of Teatro Vascello does not have to be seen as a sign of her surrender to male fantasies, as the brothers describe it. Instead, it can be read as a manifestation of her defiance. The heroine does not meekly accept the new social status forced on her by the rapists. Refusing to renounce Hamlet, she continues to visit his house, as if they were still engaged. The girl combines two contradictory roles given to women in her community—dressed as ‘a whore,’ she comes to Hamlet as his fiancée. La Ruina’s portrayal of Ophelia is highly schizophrenic, and as such it reflects a post-Freudian trend in representing the heroine’s madness. According to Showalter, since the 1960s there has been a new tendency to understand Ophelia’s condition ‘in medical and biochemical terms, as schizophrenia’ (1985: 90). The tendency drew on R.D. Laing’s research on schizophrenia, which interpreted this condition as ‘an intelligible response to the experience of invalidation within the family network, especially to the conflicting emotional messages and mystifying double binds experienced by daughters’ (Showalter 1985: 90). In Kitsch Hamlet, Ophelia’s schizophrenic behaviour exposes the rigid patriarchal categories and the hypocrisy of a traditional family model. As a victim of sexual and physical abuse, the girl does not receive any support from Hamlet’s family, and perhaps not even from her own. Such lack of care reveals discrimination present in her conservative town—discrimination so strong that instead of providing a wronged woman with justice, it protects her abusers. Similarly to her Shakespearean predecessor, the Italian Ophelia strives to find redress and solace. She fails to achieves this, yet she manages to reveal the duplicity of her community, which professes religious charity and compassion, while accepting violence and inequality. La Ruina shows that this duplicity is also deeply engrained in Hamlet and the Renaissance culture that produced it. When his Ophelia confronts the brothers about sexual abuse, she quotes the words of Shakespeare’s

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heroine. More specifically, she cites two folk songs about a girl whose loss of virginity prompted the loss of her lover (Shakespeare 2007: 4.5.48–73, 159–192; La Ruina 2006a: 54). La Ruina presents these lines in standard Italian, rather than the Calabrian dialect of the rest of the play, which juxtaposes Ophelia’s speech with the words of other characters. Such mixing of registers distinguishes also other deconstructive adaptations discussed in the book, which aim to bring together distinctive realities and values. In Kitsch Hamlet, quotations from Shakespeare’s tragedy emphasise similarities between two Ophelias, but they also hint at analogies between two distant historical periods and geographical locations. At the end of Kitsch Hamlet, Ophelia, similarly to the Renaissance heroine, manages to erase her shame only by means of self-destruction. Hiding under the coffin lid, she finds ultimate peace and redemption. Unlike Shakespeare’s Ophelia, who was associated with water, La Ruina’s protagonist becomes linked with earth in a symbolic representation of suicide. The account of Ophelia’s rape disturbs the frivolous, familiar atmosphere of the play, introducing shocking content that arrests the spectators’ attention. The rape is the central event in Kitsch Hamlet, and it is recounted rather than shown. In the course of performance Enzo, Giovanni, and Giuseppe do not initiate any action, nor do they enter into serious conflict. As the brothers aimlessly pass away the time in the house, nothing happens, and the play concludes with the revelation of crime, yet without clear plot resolution. The story of Ophelia’s rape is gradually revealed as a pivotal point in the whole drama. Her appearances provoke aggressive behaviour of the brothers and encourage them to reveal more about their crime. With each visit, the heroine encounters increased violence, yet it only gives her more confidence to act and speak, until the last scene, when she becomes a figure of absolute stillness and silence. The disturbing, provocative impact of Ophelia’s presence exposes misogynist attitudes towards women in conservative communities. In Hamlet, several characters manifest a patriarchal approach to Ophelia, which reflects the widespread preoccupation with virginity and female sexuality in the Renaissance period. As Brian Walsh argues: Ophelia’s sexuality is obsessively discussed and monitored throughout Hamlet. Polonius and Laertes take a patriarchal interest in preserving Ophelia as an unsullied feminine commodity of exchange, while Gertrude,

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in a strange and morbid moment, tosses flowers on Ophelia’s grave, wishing they had instead decorated a wedding bed. For Hamlet, Ophelia’s participation in her father’s surveillance scheme confirms his darkest misogynist attitudes. (2001: 30)

As long as Shakespeare’s heroine functions as an object of ‘patriarchal interest’ and a ‘commodity of exchange,’ she has a safe and secure position at the court. However, Hamlet’s rejection excludes her from the patriarchal protection, since the heroine ceases to be useful to the male characters in the play. When she falls into madness and becomes obsessed with death, neither Hamlet nor Claudius takes measures to protect her. Analogously, in Kitsch Hamlet, after Ophelia is raped by the three brothers, she finds herself at the margin of the community, abandoned by the family of her fiancé, and most likely, also her own. Ophelia, however, is not a passive victim, and it is evident that her dominant, uncompromising behaviour upsets the characters in La Ruina’s play. Their hostile reaction results from their refusal to accept a woman as an agent capable of originating her own actions. In the production at Teatro Vascello, Oriana Lapelosa as Ophelia is the only female performer on stage, and she introduces powerful energy with her body and voice. Her vigorous and lively movement, as well as her emotional singing, contrast with the passivity and the blandness of other characters, who are all played by men. Ophelia challenges her abusers in an imaginative and vivid manner. However, in her rebellion she is unable to escape the label of a mad woman, but like Hamlet, she has to accept it to gain freedom to act and speak her thoughts.

Gender and Madness Since their appearance in Shakespeare’s tragedy, Hamlet and Ophelia have both functioned as prototypes of insanity in Western culture, reflecting changing perceptions of gender and madness in the fields of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and literary criticism (Lidz 1975: 34; Showalter 1985: 77–94). Theodore Lidz observes that in Hamlet ‘[m]adness is the means Shakespeare used to convey the disillusion and despair that pervades the characters, and leads them to rash and self-destructive acts, and to express the dissolution of their world’ (1975: 33). Associating madness with disappointment and rebellion, the critic suggests that it might be a violent response to limitations imposed on an individual, particularly if insanity

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is perceived as ‘essential to the structure of the play as well as to the development of its themes’ (Lidz 1975: 33). In La Ruina’s adaptation, madness is a form of revolt against patriarchal society. As in Shakespeare’s tragedy, in Kitsch Hamlet the mystery of Hamlet’s and Ophelia’s madness is central to the interpretation of the play. It determines the development of the plot as well as the motivation of the protagonists; furthermore, it reveals which values are presented as acceptable and desired in the local community and which are rejected, or categorised as an aberration. In Kitsch Hamlet, Hamlet and Ophelia are perceived as insane because they refuse to comply with conservative social standards. Their refusal is particularly visible in their transgression of traditional gender roles. In the 1970s, describing a typical model of a traditional family, Edward Shorter observed that in a conservative community, male members dominate in public life, while female members nurse children and perform household duties (1975: 37–40). Men in this model are thus more likely to be present, active, and outspoken in the public sphere, whereas women tend to be absent, passive, and silent. La Ruina reverses these features in his portrayal of Hamlet and Ophelia. He shows how in defying traditional gender roles the characters seek to question limitations imposed on them by society. At the same time, in designing Ophelia as a dominant figure who takes over the stage, both in the playtext and in performance, the playwright goes against ‘a tendency,’ identified in contemporary British productions by Bridget Escolme, ‘to re-confine Ophelia spatially and thematically’ (2014: 179). Such approach might be seen, for instance, in Alice Birch and Katie Mitchell’s Ophelias Zimmer, examined earlier in the book. La Ruina, by contrast, not only liberates Ophelia, but he also completely removes Hamlet, to leave the heroine even more space for acting and speaking. Although Hamlet seemed to have had a great future lying ahead of him, given his intellectual potential and university diploma, he has voluntarily withdrawn himself from public and family life. Ophelia, on the other hand, audaciously appears in the town streets and enters the house of her fiancé, although her provocative behaviour meets with contempt from his family. Ophelia is active and even aggressive when she enters their house; she is carrying a coffin lid and shouting out her pain. Hamlet, on the other hand, is absolutely passive. His presence in the adjacent room is so unobtrusive that one cannot possibly guess what this Hamlet might be doing. Reading? Walking? Talking to himself? He might be in fact not doing anything at all, and we can only wonder if he is really

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there. Furthermore, while Ophelia manifests extraordinary physical and emotional strength, Hamlet does not exhibit any courage or force. Forcefully entering the family house, Ophelia confronts her rapists as a constant reminder of their crime. Her insistence on meeting Hamlet suggests that she might want to find in him not only a lover, but also an avenger. La Ruina’s hero, however, is unable to execute revenge. The Italian Hamlet is not only passive, but also silent; he does not even talk to the mother who feeds him and takes care of him. Consequently, he stands in sharp contrast to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who has been traditionally celebrated for his long and subtle soliloquies; he also differs from the Italian Ophelia, who desperately calls for her fiancé. In Kitsch Hamlet, the eloquence of the female protagonist increases with her every stage appearance. Significantly, as Ophelia becomes more and more articulate, she also becomes more uncontrollable, since it is ‘in madness [that] women find that they are able to stake their claim to discourse’ (Salkeld 1993: 118). It is unclear in the play if Ophelia is feigning insanity to be able to display her eloquence and dominance as forms of behaviour that are denied to women in her community. What is clear is that she cannot be seen as anything else but mad by Hamlet’s family, since her behaviour goes against their restrictive definition of femininity. Escolme makes a similar observation about the perception of Ophelia in Shakespeare’s play, when she notes, ‘Where she says what the court does not wish to hear, her threat to society is explicit, as Horatio suggests – and when a woman seems to pose such a threat, she is dismissed as mad’ (2014: 171). Madness becomes thus a sanitising label that allows a conservative community to contain and disarm the disruptive force of a woman who calls for justice. Since the characters in the play do not give justice to Hamlet and Ophelia, this task is left to the audience. La Ruina’s spectators are asked to reconstruct the story of Kitsch Hamlet following a few scattered cues in the dialogues. The brothers talk about the past without introducing any causal relationships, mixing their story with petty gossip. Consequently, it is not evident what has really happened. One may assume that Ophelia became mad because of the rape, and that Hamlet isolated himself when he learned about it. It is not explained, however, what exactly he knows. Does he understand that the girl was raped, or does he accuse her of infidelity? Has he lost his mind, or has he simply chosen to isolate himself from the world’s brutality? Is it possible that he has taken time to plan cruel revenge? The final interpretation might depend

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on the intertext of Shakespeare’s tragedy and the cultural context of the Mediterranean vendetta rather than the text of La Ruina’s drama, which remains purposefully unresolved. Positioning Hamlet as a trace, at once absent and present, both at the margin and at the very centre of the play, the adaptation leaves the audience with multiple interpretations.

Conclusion With the traces of Shakespeare’s Hamlet underlying Kitsch Hamlet, La Ruina questions the relevance of classical tragedy today. The Italian playwright deconstructs the images of the tragic hero and the tragic heroine, as well as the very concept of tragedy as a literary genre with elevated language and dignified aesthetics. As Hamlet disappears, the play comes closer to the script of Big Brother, with the action being dominated by burlesque, irony, and kitsch. Moreover, La Ruina condemns the traditional family structure and the stifling gender roles in his local community. He also denounces the objectification of women in contemporary culture, as well as the banality and brutality of contemporary television. The influence of television on human interactions is also central to Igor Bauersima’s Factory, which offers another manifestation of the Derridean trace in Hamlet adaptation.

References Barile, Pàolo, and Giuseppe Rao. 1992. ‘Trends in Italian Mass Media and Media Law.’ European Journal of Communication 7: 261–281. Draudt, Manfred. 1998. ‘Nineteenth Century Burlesques of Hamlet in London and Vienna.’ In Hamlet East-West, edited by Marta Gibinska ´ and Jerzy Limon, 64–84. Gdansk: ´ Theatrum Gedanense Foundation. Eco, Umberto. 1984. ‘A Guide to the Neo-television of the 1980s.’ Translated by Bob Lumley. Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 25: 18–27. Escolme, Bridget. 2014. ‘Ophelia Confined: Madness and Infantilisation in Some Versions of Hamlet.’ In Madness, Performance, Psychiatry: Isolated Acts, edited by Anna Halpern and J. Forster, 165–186. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Hipkins, Danielle. 2011. ‘‘Whore-ocracy’: Show Girls, the Beauty Trade-Off, and Mainstream Oppositional Discourse in Contemporary Italy.’ Italian Studies 66 (3): 413–430. ISTAT (Istituto Nazionale di Statistica). 2013. Indicatori Complementari alla Disoccupazione, 17 January. https://www.istat.it/it/archivio/79806. Accessed 30 July 2020.

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Jump, John D. 1972. Burlesque. The Critical Idiom Series, 22. London: Methuen. Kitsch Hamlet. 2004. Dir. Saverio La Ruina. Teatro Vascello, Rome. Recordings from Performances on 1–2 May. La Ruina, Saverio. 2006a. Kitsch Hamlet. Teatro in Tasca. Catanzaro: Abramo Editore. La Ruina, Salvatore. 2006b. ‘Kitsch Hamlet. Personaggi. Autopresentazione.’ Hystrio. Trimestriale di teatro e spettacolo. 1 gennaio / marzo. https://www. hystrio.it/testo/kitsch-hamlet/. Accessed 20 October 2020. Lidz, Theodore. 1975. Hamlet’s Enemy: Madness and Myth in ‘Hamlet’. New York: Basic Books. Mancewicz, Aneta. 2014. ‘Hamlet in Italy.’ In Hamlet Handbuch: Stoffe, Aneignungen, Deutungen, edited by Peter Marx, 296–300. Stuttgart and Weimar: Verlag J.B. Metzler. Marinuzzi, Giorgia, and Walter Tortorella. 2020. ‘Lo stato di salute del mercato del lavoro in Calabria: un’analisi provinciale.’ Lavoro e Occupazione, 8 June. https://www.opencalabria.com/lo-stato-di-salute-del-mercato-del-lav oro-in-calabria-unanalisi-provinciale/. Accessed 30 July 2020. Mitchell, Tony. 1996. ‘Berlusconi, Italian Television and Recent Italian Cinema: Re-viewing The Icicle Thief .’ Film Criticism 21 (1) (Fall): 13–33. O’Neill, Maggie. 2000. Prostitution and Feminism: Towards a Politics of Feeling. Cambridge: Polity Press. Rassegna stampa (Press review). n.d. Kitsch Hamlet. Scena Verticale. Rosenberg, Marvin. 1992. The Masks of Hamlet. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Salkeld, Duncan. 1993. Madness and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Scena Verticale. n.d. http://www.scenaverticale.it/. Accessed 14 October 2005. Shakespeare, William. 2007. Hamlet. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. The Arden Shakespeare. Third Series. London: Thomson Learning. Shorter, Edward. 1975. The Making of the Modern Family. New York: Basic Books. Showalter, Elaine. 1985. ‘Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism.’ In Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, edited by Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, 77–94. New York: Methuen. Sofer, Andrew. 2003. The Stage Life of Props. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Surianello, Mariateresa. 2006. ‘Prefazione.’ In Kitsch Hamlet, by Saverio La Ruina, 7–14. Teatro in Tasca. Catanzaro: Abramo Editore. Walsh, Brian. 2001. ‘The Rest Is Violence: Müller Contra Shakespeare.’ PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 23 (3) (September): 24–35.

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Wolf, Naomi. 1990. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. London: Chatto & Windus. Women and Media in Europe. Sintesi della ricerca. 2006. Fondazione Censis https://parita.regione.emilia-romagna.it/documentazione/doc Report. umentazione-temi/documentazione-stereotipi-di-genere/donne-e-media-ineuropa. Accessed 10 June 2021. Zanardo, Lorella. 2009. Il Corpo delle donne. YouTube Video, 8 November 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JtyvOeMSHY. Accessed 7 September 2021. Zanardo, Lorella. 2010. Il Corpo delle donne. Feltrinelli. Milano: Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore.

CHAPTER 11

Factory, Igor Bauersima

In Igor Bauersima’s Factory, the action develops inside a reality show in the style of Big Brother, where the contestants try to win the audience attention. The drama focuses on contemporary popular culture and media entertainment to portray the process of blurring the boundaries between exposure and concealment, truth and lie, originality and imitation, fiction and reality, tragedy and a television show. Given extraordinary similarities between the development of events in Factory and in Hamlet, the action of Shakespeare’s tragedy runs as a trace throughout Bauersima’s plot, creating the effects of doubling and distortion. Shakespeare’s drama functions in Factory more subtly than in Saverio La Ruina’s Kitsch Hamlet , not as an explicitly marked absence, but as an erased source whose traces might be visible in a new playtext. In Bauersima’s adaptation, the whole action is a reproduction of Hamlet, but the Renaissance source is never directly revealed. There are no explicit references, no signalling or signposting that would aid the audience’s memory. And yet the connection with Hamlet is so remarkable that it features even in the most succinct discussions of Factory (Dürrschmidt 2005: 14; Borowski et al. 2005: 77), which emphasise its palimpsestic character. A brief description of the play by its German publisher S. Fischer Theater Medien identifies also other key influences, such as Andy Warhol, Jacques Derrida, and Christoph Schlingensief to underline its decidedly postmodern and mediatized nature (Fischer 2019). A dramatic text will © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Mancewicz, Hamlet after Deconstruction, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96806-9_11

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be used as material for analysis in this chapter, given inaccessibility of a performance recording. Bauersima establishes modern equivalents for Shakespeare’s events and speeches through plot analogies. Even a short summary of Factory indicates strong similarities with Hamlet. The play opens with the killing of Andy, a reality show participant, which puts another contestant, Arty in the position of the greatest popularity. As the best friend of the victim, Rocky tries to revenge Andy and find evidence that would incriminate Arty. While Andy’s image is haunting the stage in a series of videos, Rocky and his friend Octave, with the help of other characters, aim to expose the murderer. There is, for instance, an official dinner at which Rocky tells an anecdote about the shooting of a pop star, in an equivalent to The Murder of Gonzago in Hamlet, and the play concludes with a bloody finale, which leaves everyone dead, except for Octave. In a fateful last scene, which vaguely evokes pessimistic and circular endings of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and Janusz Głowacki’s Fortinbras Gets Drunk, Octave wants to leave, but the voice offstage orders him to stay and wait for new participants who will enter the Factory. With Shakespeare’s tragedy as the basis of the plot, Bauersima uses a reality show format as a dramaturgical structure. Unlike Kitsch Hamlet , which only references reality shows, Factory develops inside one. In his play, Bauersima exposes the limits of media-created forms of authenticity, as well as the traps of popularity and popular culture. His play asks a series of questions that powerfully resonate with contemporary spectators. Is authenticity possible in front of the cameras? What are the consequences of blurring the boundary between reality and television? How far can we go to become famous? What is the significance of Shakespeare’s tragedy in the context of popular culture? What does it mean to be Hamlet in the era of reality show stars and seasonal celebrities? The questions of identity and morality are close to the Prague-born Bauersima, whose family emigrated to Switzerland in 1968, after the fiasco of Prague Spring, when the invasion of Warsaw Pact members put an end to the period of liberalising reforms. Acclaimed across Germanspeaking theatres as a playwright, director, and designer, Bauersima has been one of the most original and interdisciplinary theatre makers in the region. His training and experience as an architect and a video maker have enabled him to gain international recognition for stage design and combinations of video projections with live action.

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Experimentation with design and video is also prominent in the playtext of Factory. According to the stage directions, the play takes place in a building monitored by video cameras, where nine contestants compete for the spectators’ attention. The name of the place, which is also the name of the fictional TV show, alludes to Warhol’s Factory, the artist’s New York studio at 231 East 47th Street. There, between 1963 and 1968, Warhol produced such diverse forms of art as screen prints, paintings, and films in collaboration with a group of artists, musicians, models, and porn stars; his later studios at Union Square and then Broadway were also known as Factory (Lancaster 1989: 198–202). The analogy between the show and the studio is reinforced by the visual set-up of the stage, which imitates the décor of Warhol’s Factory. As Marc Lancaster recalls, the artist’s studio was painted in silver (1989: 198), and similarly the stage is covered with silver wallpaper. Furthermore, the acting area is occupied by several sofas, music instruments, paints, tools, and empty bottles, which suggests that the stage, analogously to Warhol’s studio, is a site of art production as well as intense social activity. One could also argue that there are echoes of Heiner Müller’s The Hamletmachine in the play, since Bauersima includes a huge freezer and a TV set that recall the refrigerator and three television sets in Müller’s drama as consumer objects and symbols of two key human activities: preservation of food and production of images. Warhol’s influence on the play, however, is not only aesthetic but also conceptual. His idea of an art studio as a factory introduces a radical manifesto about the process of making and interpreting art. In an early scene of Factory, one of the characters, Fritz, evokes Warhol’s philosophy of art production, arguing that it forms the very basis of the reality show: […] we ARE art here. It’s not about MAKING art, but rather about BEING art. […] Everybody is an artist; everybody is a work of art. THIS is Factory. It is no authorial workshop here, or anything like that, but the art of life! (Bauersima 2002: 50)

Fritz’s comment succinctly grasps some of the fundamental principles of Warhol’s Pop Art, such as the perception of art as everyday life (art as ‘BEING’), the process of its democratisation (‘Everybody is an artist; everybody is a work of art’), and the idea of remaining on the surface, without implying any hidden meanings (‘no authorial workshop,’ but rather ‘the art of life’).

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These principles find their application not only in the formula of the show, but also in Bauersima’s approach to Hamlet. His method of adapting Shakespeare’s tragedy, the status which he assigns to it, and the relationship which he creates between the Renaissance source and the contemporary audience bear significant affinities to Warhol’s view of art as a mechanical process of producing serial images. More specifically, in Bauersima’s dramatic treatment of Hamlet, we might find similarities with the technique of silkscreen printing, which to general public has become synonymous not only with Warhol’s work, but also with Pop Art more broadly. The technique depends on a close relationship between an original image and its copy in a way that captures the unique link between the source and adaptation in Factory. In particular, silkscreen printing as a method of adaptation offers an insight into the application of the Derridean trace in Bauersima’s drama, since it presents the alteration of the source in terms of replacement and layering of elements.

Silkscreen Printing as a Method of Adaptation Silkscreen printing is a process of altering an image to produce multiple versions with different effects of colour and background. As such, it is strikingly similar to Linda Hutcheon’s definition of adaptation as a ‘repetition with variation’ (2013: 4). The analogy between silkscreen printing and adaptation is particularly compelling in the case of Factory. In this play, Bauersima takes Shakespeare’s tragedy and applies to it a contemporary context and language in a way that resembles Warhol’s transformation of public images of pop culture icons into silkscreen prints. Whereas with silkscreen technique, the artist modified well-known images through the changes of colour and contrast; the playwright alters the renowned source by replacing the setting, the names of protagonists, and the dialogues while maintaining the skeleton of the plot. Given Bauersima’s approach, it is still likely that at least some audience members will recognise references to Hamlet. Similarly, Warhol would have expected that the public would identify in his prints the iconic images of such famous figures as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and Elizabeth Taylor. In the end, Bauersima’s adaptation is a new play with its own title, just as Warhol’s silkscreen prints function as independent artefacts. The use of silkscreen printing as a method of adaptation resembles the strategy of a deconstructive trace and can be seen as its variant. In

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Factory, the characters take the roles of Shakespeare’s protagonists, while the audience may identify the traces of Hamlet in the development of action. The act of adaptation, however, is more radical than what this brief description suggests. The playwright reduces Shakespeare’s source to a series of sensational events, turning the tragic hero into an aspiring celebrity figure who acts within a pre-determined scenario. Consequently, the script of Factory mocks the elevated status of Shakespeare’s tragedy, while its action explicitly remains on the surface of Hamlet. The similarities between the source and the adaptation concern the development of the events and the portrayal of the protagonists as the most conspicuous, the most easily recognised elements of Shakespeare’s tragedy. Rocky’s efforts to expose Andy’s murderer and his relationships with other characters situate him in the position of Hamlet, turning Factory into a modern-day Elsinore. Analogously, in applying the technique of silkscreen printing, Warhol emphasised the most prominent features of the portrayed pop icons without pretending to offer any intimate insight into their personality. In Bauersima’s play, the protagonists do not explore the subtleties of poetic diction nor do they ask philosophical questions. Instead, they are obsessed with popularity, which they see as a means of acquiring power and wealth, while they refuse to consider ethical implications of their deeds. The only character who reflects on the values of the reality show culture is Candy, but her surrealistic poems cannot communicate with other contestants and the audience. Bauersima’s decision to trace Hamlet only at the surface, as a silkscreen print of well-known events and figures, reflects the spirit of our times, which are marked by the crisis of signification understood here as a process of subverting traditional notions of reality, truth, and knowledge. Television channels and social media offer sensational images and headlines, yet often without exploring the implications of presented messages, let alone ascertaining their truth. Meanwhile, the democratisation and commercialisation of communication technologies is accompanied by the rise of celebrities and influencers, while authority figures and experts are frequently brushed aside. This crisis of signification has not emerged only in the last few decades, but it has been articulated at least since the 1960s by a range of theorists, including among others Roland Barthes (e.g. 1991), Jean Baudrillard (e.g. 1988), Daniel J. Boorstin (e.g. 1992), and Umberto Eco (e.g. 1998). Writing from different cultural and political perspectives, these prominent intellectuals have deconstructed the

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link between an object and its meaning to question referentiality, representation, and meaning-making practices in Western culture. The crisis of signification might be also directly identified in many of Warhol’s works, which are provocatively repetitive and empty. In Factory, Bauersima alludes to this quality of Warhol’s art with a play on words. When Candy declares that Andy was hollow, the phrase in German is a homophone of ‘Andy Warhol’ as in ‘Andy war hohl’ (2002: 45). Indeed, Paul Mattick argues that the appeal of Warhol’s works consists precisely in their hollowness or rather shallowness, since his art ‘lies on the surface, not in philosophic depths—on surfaces like Marilyn’s face, a newspaper headline, or a cereal box, with depths enough of their own for millions to swim in’ (1998: 987). The meaning of Warhol’s art depends thus on the viewers’ interpretations rather than on the intrinsic value of the work itself. Analogously, in Factory, the presence of Shakespeare’s tragedy relies on the reconstruction of tragic traces by audience members. Since there are no direct references to the source, the appeal of this play as an adaptation depends on the viewers’ ability to identify what has been erased and bringing it to the foreground. Bauersima’s experiment might thus satisfy those enthusiasts of Hamlet who would want to see the tragedy developing in an alternative context, with slightly altered events and with modern equivalents of Shakespeare’s characters pronouncing different dialogues. Such a model of adaptation is suggested, for instance, by Milan Kundera, when in his novel The Joke he wonders, ‘What would Hamlet be without the castle at Elsinore, without Ophelia, without all the concrete situations he goes through, what would he be without the text of his part?’ (1992: 163). The Czech writer indirectly implies an answer to this question, when he asks, ‘What would be left but an empty, dumb, illusory essence?’ (1992: 163). Indeed, Bauersima offers just the essence of Shakespeare’s tragedy, which allows him to explore the consequences of reducing an eminent source to a bare skeleton. When the television contestants take the roles of the Renaissance characters, and the show itself starts to follow the plot of one of the greatest European tragedies, the process of commercialisation and democratisation of Shakespeare’s drama becomes complete. The use of Shakespeare’s plot as a scenario in a reality show format corresponds to a more general tendency in postmodern culture that consists in dissolving the boundaries between high culture and popular entertainment. This phenomenon is particularly conspicuous in Warhol’s art. According to Mattick:

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[…] the whole history of the fine arts since they came into existence as a social practice in the later eighteenth century has included as a central element their distinction from what in contrast became ordinary things. Warhol’s work marks a moment of the disintegration of this venerable practice, a disintegration that art shares with other ideological constructs of modern society such as science, politics, and the self. (1998: 971–972)

With the rise of the Internet and social media, which were conceived at least in principle as democratic and participatory spaces, the process of ‘disintegration’ identified by Mattick has gone even further. In 2015, Eco memorably observed that ‘social media gave the right of speech to legions of imbeciles’ (qtd. in Smargiassi 2019), with expert opinions being drowned by more numerous and aggressive comments of non-specialists. This practice is also visible in reality shows, which persistently promote seasonal celebrities and trends. In Factory, Bauersima ironically portrays the promise made by television (and more recently, by social media) that fame and success are within reach of those who are ready to forsake their privacy. The playwright positions the reality show characters as doomed figures. As his protagonists violently pursue popularity, Bauersima exposes the perils of contemporary celebrity culture. Factory might be thus seen as a dark realisation of Warhol’s prediction that in the future fame will be fleeting, but also available to everybody. At the same time, as an adaptation of Hamlet, the drama points to the impossibility of retaining heroic patterns of behaviour as models that could speak to contemporary viewers.

From Heroes to Celebrities According to Bauersima’s script, average individuals have been cast as contestants in the show, which implies that anybody could have become a resident of the Factory. The show producers, however, go even further: with the décor of the house as an art studio, they suggest that in television anybody can become an artist. Bauersima adds still another dimension to this egalitarian myth, showing how in contemporary culture everyone can become a modern equivalent of Claudius or Hamlet. When Arty begins to contrive murderous plots in a way similar to Claudius, or when Rocky takes the role of Hamlet, their anti-heroic behaviour and contemporary language remind us that the tragic dimension of the source has been irrevocably lost. Heroes have been replaced by celebrities. Already

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in 1962, in the context of American culture and politics, Boorstin noted that as a consequence of ‘Graphic Revolution,’ which he defined as the unprecedented facility of producing, transmitting, preserving, and sharing images, ‘[w]e can fabricate fame, we can at will (though usually at considerable expense) make a man or a woman well-known, but we cannot make him great’ (1992: 48). This fabrication has led to the confusion between celebrities and heroes, with little recognition given to heroic behaviour. What followed was the rise of ‘marketable human models—modern “heroes”—[that] could be mass-produced’ (Boorstin 1992: 48). Boorstin’s comments point to the phenomena of massproduction, commercialisation, and devaluation of high-culture standards—the phenomena which were both pronounced and practised by Warhol. Affinities between Boorstin’s and Warhol’s observations reveal striking similarities across media, politics, public life, and art in the use of images for creating the illusion of reality and greatness. The focus on images rather than texts is crucial here, as it indicates an increased emphasis on immediacy, accessibility, and marketability in the post-war cultural production, which became particularly visible in the United States in the 1960s. It is precisely in this context that both Boorstin and Warhol perceptively identified the phenomenon of celebrity culture, which has subsequently dominated a global cultural landscape, and which Bauersima explores through his anti-heroic, fame-driven protagonists. Bauersima makes it clear that the contestants are in no way more eloquent or interesting than the people sitting in the audience. The only thing that distinguishes characters such as Rocky, Arty, or Andy from the people outside is that they have agreed to appear in front of the cameras and, consequently, each day they expose their private lives to thousands of invisible viewers. The contestants have not been chosen to join the show because of their exceptional skills or remarkable personality traits, but in recognition of their fascination with fame. And yet, although the participants do not seem to possess any talent, many of them still have an ambition to become artists. Candy writes poems, Yvy dabbles in photography, whereas Andy tells stories. Denis, a former show contestant, painted pictures. They are all amateurs, struggling for public appreciation and acceptance. Ivy’s comment might exemplify not only her own expectations but also those of others in the show; after all, they have all willingly accepted the rules of the programme and agreed to exhibit themselves for self-promotion:

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I came here to become an artist. And I have understood that: if a man does not believe in anything, it does not mean that this is nothing. One has to handle the nothing as if it were something. Something may be done from nothing. I have just come close to learn something about myself and life, and to become famous and rich. (2002: 54)

In this self-affirming speech, Ivy reveals that her desire for enlightenment is equally important as her desire for fame and money. The statement might be read as a parody of Pop Art artists, who aimed to combine creative work with commercial success. The connection between creativity and profit is also metaphorically implied by Andy, who in Bauersima’s play might represent Warhol, not only because of his name but also because of his popularity and success. Concluding his last story, the protagonist notes: My stories are tables, which I can trade. And that is why I can gain the equivalent of my tables only at the cost of others, because I am just winning in a game, the rules of which I despise. (2002: 87)

The comparison of stories with tables allows Andy to introduce an image of a solid, useful object that gives satisfaction both to its maker and its users. At the same time, the protagonist suggests that stories/tables are also goods which can be traded and sold for an agreed sum of money. Both these aspects of the table metaphor imply that telling stories might be understood in terms of making commodity objects, whereas a narrator is not different from a carpenter. While the analogy explicitly reflects Warhol’s philosophy of art Factory, it also allows Bauersima to emphasise the link between the characters and the TV viewers as partners in a commercial transaction.

TV and Theatre Audiences A direct appeal to the audience and the focus on their reception is fundamental to Factory. It is also prominent in the work of several other German-speaking practitioners contemporary to Bauersima, including Gob Squad, Rimini Protokoll, and Schlingsief, who have used media to play with perceptions and preconceptions surrounding spectatorship. Schlingsief’s Bitte Liebt Österreich [Please Love Austria] from 2000 is

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especially relevant here as a striking example of using a Big Brothertype format as a dramaturgical device. In this highly publicised work, fictional asylum seekers were locked in containers at the centre of Vienna, and the public was invited to vote about their future. The performance sought to provoke a national debate about immigration in the context of election success of Jörg Haider’s nationalist and anti-immigration FPÖ party [the Austrian Freedom Party]. Although Bauersima does not have an immediate political agenda, and his script does not rely on real-time participation of the actual audience, he shares Schlingsief’s fascination with the mediatization of social and political life at the turn of the twentyfirst century. He also shows an acute awareness of rising populism and the brutalisation of public discourse. In Factory as a play, Bauersima imagines the presence of television audiences. According to the script, over three hundred and fifty thousand people are watching the show on TV, and we are made to understand that their interest in individual characters is measured and represented in real time on nine separate screens, the so-called ‘reactiometers’ [die Reaktiometer], abbreviated as RMs, which are assigned to each of the show participants. The participant with the lowest RM result has to leave the Factory, whereas the one who maintains the highest level of audience attention becomes the winner. The prize is never specified, which suggests that gaining fame might be appealing enough for the contestants, particularly if they believe that they will be able to capitalise on their popularity later. The contestants are determined to win, and throughout the play, they constantly refer to their RM results. They are also extremely anxious that one of them will be forced to leave the show. In the course of action, the values on RMs constantly change, indicating rapid variations in the audience’s interest and the contestants’ dependence on the viewing public. In this way, the reactions of the fictional television spectators are embedded into the play’s scenario even if the actual theatrical audience is not referenced. Apart from the dramaturgical importance of RMs, the link between the show participants and the television spectators is emphasised by an anonymous commentator offstage, who is discussing the events and issuing orders. The commentator influences the reactions of the television spectators, while supposedly representing their views. This results in an atmosphere of scandal and suspicion, especially since the videos made in the show are allegedly edited in such a way that they are either biased or ambiguous. At the same time, Bauersima introduces in his drama an

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intriguing combination of confinement and surveillance. The contestants have limited contact with the outside world, while the cameras follow their every movement in the house. Stage directions give a precise account of the building’s architecture. High on the wall, there is a skylight that offers only a distant, unattainable connection with the external environment, whereas the arrangement of the space into a system of small rooms and the lack of an exit introduce the sense of concealment, confinement, and claustrophobia. Simultaneously, the presence of cameras which may project images from the house on an impressive stage screen excludes any privacy, particularly if we assume that the reality show is available to hundreds of thousands viewers, at least according to the script. Given that the play is written to be shown on stage, the actors will be additionally confronted with theatre audience during every performance. Spectators watching a production of Bauersima’s drama might thus recognise themselves in the roles of television viewers, particularly since they also follow important parts of the action on the onstage screen. Simultaneously, however, the theatre audience has a unique perspective, because they can access the images on screen as well as the actions on stage. This double perspective allows them to maintain distance to the events and recognise the manipulation of the show’s producers, who strive to influence the relationship between the participants and the television viewers (Borowski and Sugiera 2005: 30). The contestants struggle to sustain connection with the television viewers, even though they are supposed to be just like them. Deprived of interactions with the outside world, they have little to offer, while their behaviour is corrupted by the presence of the cameras. Living in an artificial reality of the show, isolated in a video-monitored building, the contestants develop temporary relationships and alliances, desperately trying to attract attention of the audience. Their conversations and actions are predominantly inward-looking. As such, their behaviour resonates with the self-referentiality of television identified by Eco in the 1980s, in the context of the increasingly commercialised ‘Neo-Television’: The principal characteristic of Neo-TV is that it talks less and less about the external world. Whereas Paleo-TV talked about the external world, or pretended to, Neo-TV talks about itself and about the contact that it establishes with its own public. It does not matter what it might say, nor what it might be talking about (now more than ever, since the public, armed with remote control, decides when to let it speak and when to

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switch channels). Neo-TV, in order to survive this control, seeks to hold the viewer by saying to him: ‘l am here, it’s me, I am you.’ (1984: 19)

An obsessive focus on themselves and the viewer as the one who is in control finds its extreme representation in Factory, where establishing a connection with imaginary television spectators is the central goal of the show’s contestants and the driving force of the action. While the protagonists are competing for popularity, the border between being authentic and acting out becomes blurred. The principle of reality show programmes, which might be roughly formulated as ‘to be oneself,’ ceases to mean anything when the characters are desperately focused on becoming worthy of audience attention. Ivy openly declares that the objective of the contest is to gain the spectators’ interest (2002: 50), whereas Arty claims that even though the television sees them all, one must become ‘the point at which everything is aimed’ (2002: 52). The pressure on the participants is so strong that some of them lose their sanity, with female contestants being particularly vulnerable. One of them, Billie, locks herself up in the toilet and has to be fed by others; she refuses to participate in the events in the studio. Another one, Candy, experiences a nervous breakdown, which eventually leads to her death. Her story in particular seems to be inspired by Shakespeare’s Ophelia. Disturbed by Andy’s murder, Candy no longer distinguishes reality from fiction. She confuses a fellow contestant Fritz with a police officer and then with her brother Fred. Rejected by Rocky, the girl further distances herself from others and devotes her time to writing poems, which she later recites to other protagonists. At the end of the play, when Fred actually arrives at the Factory, Candy does not recognise him. Distraught and depressed, she proceeds to the bathroom, where she commits suicide. Isolated in the television studio, all the contestants become more and more detached from everyday life. Consequently, their actions cease to be natural. Octave openly declares this to the audience in a speech with which he hopes to gain their approval: People, between us and you there is something that we cannot get rid of. Between us and you is… a lie… and we must cope with it. A human being is not like that. People are not like that. It is awful to be part of this claim, but I cannot get out of this. In normal life, people are not like that. (2002: 61)

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Despite his frankness, or at least appearances of it, Octave does not manage to capture the viewers’ interest; the value on his RM does not change. Observing this scene, Rocky realises that if he wants to expose Arty as a murderer, he must distinguish himself from other participants of the show and offer something exceptional to the audience. To achieve this, he decides to imitate Andy’s successful strategy of telling stories. An obsession with popularity means that the characters choose different tactics of self-presentation even though they all share a populist claim of having a special relationship with the people. Some of the characters, such as Andy, Arty, or Rocky, attempt to become television icons, so they hide behind fictional representations. Others, like Fritz, do not produce polished speeches and actions (2002: 52), professing instead some form of authenticity. Almost all of the contestants constantly monitor their RMs, desperately hoping to remain in the show. The behaviour of the protagonists suggests that the traditional notion of identity has been replaced by a provisional, external image, which is manufactured and packaged as a product. Exploiting the tensions between the contestants and the spectators, Bauersima reflects on the nature of social interactions and the influence of the media on human behaviour. In the context of the reality show, the play suggests that under certain conditions, some of us have the potential to become murderers and behave similarly to Claudius. There is also an implication that average individuals may be placed in situations analogous to those of Hamlet, Horatio, Gertrude, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. This indicates that Bauersima adapts the action of Hamlet as a template for social interactions. According to this interpretation, Shakespeare’s tragedy captures some of the most basic human emotions, such as the greed for power, the need of revenge, and the danger of manipulation—all those themes that might correspond to Kundera’s notion of Hamlet ’s ‘essence.’ Different historical and cultural contexts reconfigure these emotions in novel ways, while activating distinctive elements from the template. From this perspective, Factory functions very much like The Murder of Gonzago—it repeats a well-known story in a way that is both entirely new and inescapably familiar. The reality show format becomes here a distancing device, which not only supports estrangement from the source plot but also transforms a metatheatrical reference into a meta-mediatic one. Simultaneously, the analogies with Hamlet elevate the action of Factory, given the iconic status of Shakespeare’s drama. If the contestants are recognised as traces of Shakespeare’s protagonists, they

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can no longer be seen as average, since they acquire the tragic dimension of the source heroes. This happens even if the framework of tragedy in Bauersima’s drama has been significantly altered by the use of the reality of show format, which includes the description of television tricks in the script. Television tricks in Factory aim at arresting the audience attention, and they consist in repeating important scenes and insinuating shocking meanings. They are the most evident in the representation of Andy’s murder on the big screen. Andy’s death exposes the dark side of the contestants’ preoccupation with popularity. It shows that to appeal to the television audience, the protagonists are capable of performing any action, however violent or vulgar. Thus Arty kills the most admired participant in the show, which does not stop Tara from attempting to have sex with the murderer. The contestants are ready to violate legal and moral principles, because they perceive themselves to be on the surface of reality, and they do not give proper meaning to their deeds. This notion corresponds to Fritz’s observation about ‘the art of life,’ which attributes an exceptional character to the behaviour of the Factory residents. The concept of ‘the art of life’ is inherently paradoxical, just like the idea of the reality show itself, since both of them bring together the notions of inventiveness and ordinariness, as well as artificiality and nature. An analogous contradiction appears in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, where the Player encourages Guildenstern to ‘[a]ct natural’ (Stoppard 1967: 51), merging carefully crafted performance with spontaneous behaviour. The idea of ‘the art of life’ is taken to the extreme in the video of Andy’s death, as described in the playtext. The murder is exaggerated to provoke strong reactions of the television spectators, as well as the people sitting in the theatre. The protagonist is not shot on stage, directly in front of the audience; instead, the incident is shown on the big screen. The unrealistic and mediatized representation of the murder is reinforced by Rocky’s initial reaction, the subsequent versions of this scene on the screen, as well as the responses of other Factory inhabitants. When Rocky hears a series of shots, he asks other characters to turn down the volume, associating the sound with another television programme rather than an actual event in the Factory. Later in the play, several variants of the shooting scene are displayed on the screen. According to the script, the murder is shown from different angles, repeated in slow motion, and remixed into a television trailer through a montage of images accompanied by an offstage voice. These variants are supposed to make the

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incident more understandable to the audience, but since the interpretation of the scene depends on the angle at which the killing is shown (Borowski and Sugiera 2005: 31), the videos construct the meaning and not just merely document it. It is thus not surprising that several characters, such as Candy, Yvy, Rocky, and Octave, indirectly question authenticity of this material—they refuse to believe that Andy is dead, even when they see his blood. The way in which the killing is introduced and reproduced in Factory establishes a special kind of relationship between the event and the audience. The spectators are expected to feel intrigued if not shocked, but they are also invited to interrogate what they are shown by the television producers. It is not clear what exactly happens when Andy is shot and the multiple videos of the scene are aimed to fuel the audience’s curiosity. A close scrutiny of this material is fundamental to solving the murder mystery, but it also points to broader questions about the mechanisms of media manipulation. Portraying death as a series of videos, Bauersima explores a paradoxical assumption, advanced by postmodern thinkers such as Baudrillard and Eco, that images tend to be perceived by the viewers as real, and in some cases even more real than what has been seen and experienced firsthand. Writing about the development of television, Eco argued that in its early stages the medium was perceived as an extension of reality: ‘Experiments in the 1960s taught us that for many underdeveloped viewers the evenings viewing was understood to be a continuum without distinctions between truth and fiction’ (1984: 20). Comparing this state of affairs to later television trends, he ironically noted specific strategies that TV presenters adopted in the 1980s to help the viewers determine whether a particular story is to be taken seriously or not: the strategies consisted in looking directly into the camera or looking away from it. A quick examination of these strategies revealed, however, that it was not possible to rely on them, and Eco himself admitted that the question of the real on screen remained unresolved (1984: 20). In the second decade of the twenty-first century, audiences have certainly become more attuned to different strategies of producing authenticity and truth on screen. For years, they have seen how television channels have been using a wide variety of formats, in which regular people as well as celebrities claim to offer a privileged insight into their private lives. The amount of repetition in the dialogues and dramaturgy, however, has made it clear that what these formats actually offer has been carefully scripted rather than spontaneously caught on camera. Reality shows in particular have ceased

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to be viewed as raw documents of life. Instead, they are now seen as prefabricated scenarios, specifically designed to offer popular entertainment. There is still of course a number of ‘underdeveloped viewers,’ to cite Eco again, who continue to treat images on screen as real events, or even as part of their own experience. This is because, as Mateusz Borowski and Małgorzata Sugiera explain, media messages can be particularly seductive, since they are constructed in such a way that they might be easily recognised and comprehended by spectators, who are encouraged to treat them as reflections of real life (2005: 33). In Factory, the contestants exploit mediated notions of reality, authenticity, and truth to gain the audience attention. At the same time, the adaptation challenges a naive understanding of these notions by drawing on Hamlet as one of the most established scenarios in Western culture and by framing it as a trace. Throughout Bauersima’s play, echoes of Shakespeare’s tragedy can be subtly discerned in the development of the plot, but given the lack of overt references and citations, the audience has to decide if what they are seeing is indeed an adaptation of a familiar script and if so, to what extent. The reality show format further complicates the issue of Hamlet ’s adaptation, not so much because it shifts the cultural contexts of the source, but because it contests firm distinctions between spontaneous and scripted behaviour. Reality shows have started off with a promise of bringing the truth on screens, but a few decades later the audiences know that these programmes merely commodify and monetise the concept of truth. This critical perspective in Factory is reinforced through references to Warhol as an astute interpreter of blurring the boundary between television and the real life. In the play, Bauersima paraphrases the artist’s famous response to having escaped the assassination attempt: I never knew, is it life, or is it television. But in the moment, when I was shot, I knew: It is television. (2002: 33)

This statement is quoted at the beginning of Factory, and it serves as its motto. Warhol’s observation articulates the television’s unique power to create heightened drama. At the same time, however, it warns the audience against dangerous and possibly deadly aspects of celebrity culture, since the near-fatal assassination of Warhol combines the elements of

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‘celebrity and violence’ (Shone 1987: 252), similarly to Andy’s death in Factory. The provocative nature of Warhol’s statement makes one doubt if the association of television with death may really warn anyone, particularly since spectators do not want to be admonished but entertained. Indeed, the televised image of Andy’s death does not ultimately constitute a memento to the inhabitants of the Factory (with the exception of Rocky and Octave), or the show’s television viewers. Instead, the heavily manipulated video, repeatedly displayed on the big screen, begins to function similarly to another artistic project of Warhol, ‘Death and Disaster’ series, which comprises about 70 images that portray car crashes, electric chairs, suicides, etc. In what Paul Bergin calls ‘disaster images’ (1967: 361), Warhol is not dealing with death directly, but he uses news photos, taken by a camera and reproduced by a printing press. The act of photography and printing distances the artist and the audience from the immediate impact of the tragic event. As Bergin claims: The death images […] when stacked up force the viewer to do a double take, force him to consider the picture longer than he might have and finally force him, if he is observing the canvas at all objectively, to admit that the repetition renders the image meaningless. (1967: 361)

A picture of a car crash may at first seem shocking, yet if it is repeatedly exhibited to the public, it no longer evokes empathy—it becomes an icon. Similarly, when Andy’s murder is shown on the screen multiple times, the image loses its emotional impact. Analogously, in Factory, the processes of repetition, reduction, and redistribution of Hamlet result in diminishing the tragic impact of the source and in the audience’s desensitisation. Initially, Bauersima’s method of deconstructive adaptation may seem like a shocking departure, since Shakespeare’s scenario is reduced to the plot skeleton and the language is deprived of its dignity. Soon, however, the analogies become automatic, whereas the application of Hamlet in the context of popular culture underlines the superficiality of human relations in the show as well as the hollowness of contemporary media practices. Bauersima, like many other playwrights before and after him, changes the aesthetic, historical, and philosophical circumstances of Shakespeare’s source, yet his primary focus is not on originality but on repetition. The concept of cliché, evoked in Chapter 9, is fundamental here, not only because it is used to generate

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the play’s content, but also because it signals a critical approach to Hamlet. With its insistence on an average hero and everyday interactions, Factory introduces a simplified and deliberately superficial perspective on Shakespeare’s tragedy.

Conclusion Bauersima retains the plot of Shakespeare’s drama as a trace while shifting the focus from the dilemmas of revenge, politics, and history to the paradoxes of television culture and mediatized representations of reality. This shift occurs in the context of such contemporary phenomena as the rising power of media corporations and the growing obsession with celebrity. In the post-war period, the private and commercial media have gradually gained control over the design and distribution of information and entertainment, with the explosion of social media accelerating the process. Contemporary celebrities are capable of determining social habits, cultural practices, as well as economic and political trends on an unprecedented scale. Increasingly, social media with their global outreach influence the very nature of human interactions and choices, since, to quote Marshall McLuhan, ‘the personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology’ (2003: 7). In Factory, the use of reality show hints at a broader shift towards globalisation. Successful entertainment formats tend to be sold to television stations in multiple countries, which results in a repetitive nature of media offer. Big Brother, which was created in 1997–1999 in the Netherlands by John de Mol for the Dutch-based media production company Endemol, has been broadcast so far in over sixty franchise countries and regions. Bauersima’s adaptation suggests that in the twenty-first century, Hamlet itself might function similarly to a television franchise—condensed to a series of events, it can be reused globally. At the same time, references to Warhol and analogies with silkscreen printing bring the elements of celebrity culture, hinting at parallels between Hamlet ’s characters and pop stars. This is because the images that were originally chosen and modified by Warhol for his prints testify to the public’s fascination with famous people, regardless of whether their fame owes to talent, privilege, or self-promotion.

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Ultimately, the playwright’s approach leads to the merging of two distinctive genres: the Elizabethan tragedy and a television show scenario. Audience members might identify the traces of Shakespeare’s tragedy, while they are following the exploits of reality show participants, who are preoccupied with their popularity. In accordance with Hutcheon’s definition of adaptation as ‘repetition with variation,’ quoted previously, Factory repeats the plot of Hamlet, yet in an entirely different, media-saturated set-up and for an audience that is accustomed to screen culture. At the same time, the adaptation strategy designed by Bauersima addresses several phenomena within contemporary popular culture, such as the commercialisation of television, the powerful impact of the media on social interactions, and the rise of celebrity figures. The presence of Hamlet as a trace in this version might be subtle and sketchy, yet it ultimately points to broader issues concerning the role of television and social media in the twenty-first century.

References Barthes, Roland. 1991. Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers. New York: The Noonday Press/Farrar Straus & Giroux. Baudrillard, Jean. 1988. Selected Writings. Edited by Mark Poster. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bauersima, Igor. 2002. ‘Factory.’ In Theater Theater. Aktuelle Stücke 12, edited by Uwe B. Carstensen and Stefanie von Lieven, 31–91. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag. Bergin, Paul. 1967. ‘Andy Warhol: The Artist as Machine.’ Art Journal 26 (4) (Summer): 359–363. Boorstin, Daniel J. 1992. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. New York: Vintage Books. Borowski, Mateusz, and Małgorzata Sugiera. 2005. ‘Wariacje na formy i wspomnienia.’ In Wielo´sc´ teatrów I. Antologia najnowszych sztuk niemieckich, edited by Mateusz Borowski, Małgorzata Sugiera, and Anna Wierzchowska-Wo´zniak, 7–46. Kraków: Ksi˛egarnia Akademicka. Borowski, Mateusz, Małgorzata Sugiera, and Anna Wierzchowska-Wo´zniak, eds. 2005. Wielo´sc´ teatrów I. Antologia najnowszych sztuk niemieckich. Kraków: Ksi˛egarnia Akademicka. Dürrschmidt, Anja. 2005. ‘Von der Unmöglichkeit, ein Ochse zu sein. Igor Bauersima.’ In Stück-Werk 4. Deutschschweizer Dramatik, edited by Barbara Engelhandt and Dagmar Valser, 13–15. Berlin: Theater der Zeit. Eco, Umberto. 1984. ‘A Guide to the Neo-television of the 1980s.’ Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media. 25: 18–27.

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Eco, Umberto. 1998. Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality. Translated by William Weaver. London: Vintage. Fischer, S. Theater Medien. 2019. Factory. Nach einer Geschichte von Réjane Desvignes und Igor Bauersima. https://www.fischertheater.de/theater/stu eck/factory/971214?playId=971214&lang=en. Accessed 1 September 2020. Hutcheon, Linda, with Siobhan O’Flynn. 2013. A Theory of Adaptation. New York and London: Routledge. Kundera, Milan. 1992. The Joke. Revised translation by Michael Henry Heim, Author, and Aaron Asher. London: Faber and Faber. Lancaster, Mark. 1989. ‘Andy Warhol Remembered.’ The Burlington Magazine 131.1032 (March): 198–202. Mattick, Paul. 1998. ‘The Andy Warhol of Philosophy and the Philosophy of Andy Warhol.’ Critical Inquiry 24 (4) (Summer): 965–987. McLuhan, Marshall. 2003. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London and New York: Routledge Classics. Shone, Richard. 1987. ‘Andy Warhol 1929–87.’ The Burlington Magazine 129.1009 (April): 252. Smargiassi, Michele. 2019. ‘Umberto Eco, i social, gli imbecilli e cosa disse veramente quel giorno.’ La Repubblica. January 5. https://www.repubblica. it/lestorie/2019/01/05/news/umberto_eco_i_social_gli_imbecilli_e_cosa_ disse_veramente_quel_giorno-215761508/. Accessed 10 June 2021. Stoppard, Tom. 1967. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: A Play in Three Acts. New York: Samuel French.

CHAPTER 12

Conclusion

In the final act of the play, when Hamlet is walking through the graveyard with Horatio, his thoughts instinctively return to death and afterlife. He has been obsessively examining these issues from the beginning of the tragedy, and now, as his own tortured journey is about to end, he makes these bitter remarks: To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till’a find it stopping a bung-hole? (Shakespeare 2007: 5.1.192–194)

Wondering about the posthumous fate of Alexander the Great, the prince imagines that the king’s physical remains, which have long ago decayed and turned into earth, might serve to ‘stop a beer-barrel’ (Shakespeare 2007: 5.1.201). Similarly, he considers how Julius Caesar’s body, transformed into clay, might be used by a peasant to fill a hole in a building (Shakespeare 2007: 5.1.202–205). While mortal themes dominate in Shakespeare’s tragedy (Knight 1970: 28), Hamlet’s reflections on what happens after death do not focus exclusively on the biological decomposition of bodies. As Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor write in their editorial comment on that passage, the protagonist ‘seems fascinated by the literal as well as spiritual “afterlife”’ (qtd. in Shakespeare 2007: 423n). In particular, Hamlet’s speculations about Alexander the Great and Caesar © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Mancewicz, Hamlet after Deconstruction, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96806-9_12

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correspond to the hero’s apprehension regarding his own afterlife and the ‘base uses’ to which he himself might be posthumously reduced. Having examined here a selection of plays and performances that exemplify the deconstructive afterlife of Hamlet, I conclude with a few observations about the implications of deconstruction for the ‘uses’ of Shakespeare’s tragedy in post-war European drama and theatre. The subversive character of Derrida-inspired paradigm provokes a question as to what happens to Hamlet after deconstruction. If the tragedy dissolves, and the eponymous hero disappears, does it mean that they are no longer significant for artists and their audiences? If the coherence and the universality of Hamlet are being systematically challenged in the process of deconstruction, does it mean that Shakespeare’s contribution to post-war drama and theatre is only fragmentary and partial? The application of supplement, différance, and trace as critical instruments foregrounds the acts of suspending and deferring the presence of an object and its ultimate meaning. A deconstructive analysis might suggest that Hamlet is becoming less present and visible in post-war drama and theatre, since the tragedy has to be reclaimed from its substitutes, such as supplementary scenarios, multiple metaphors, and ordinary characters. Nevertheless, supplement, différance, and trace as dramaturgical tools also depend on the acts of duplicating or multiplying the meaning of the represented material through the evocation of novel connotations in the memory of the audience. A deconstructive analysis of post-war plays and productions indicates thus that it is the pervasiveness of Shakespeare’s tragedy and its hero in Western culture that makes the process of deconstructive adaptation possible. If audience members are encouraged to supplement, differ and defer, or trace references to Hamlet in modern texts and performances, it means that they are expected to have a high level of familiarity with Shakespeare’s source as a fundamental element of European culture. Deconstructive adaptations are thus dependent on the continuous presence of Hamlet in the memory of the audience. Discussing Tom Stoppard’s plays, Thomas R. Whitaker aptly observes that the notion of absence requires that we have access to an object which is not there; analogously, the idea of absurd implies the existence of order against which we may measure the twisting of reality rules (1990: 110). In the plays of Saverio La Ruina and Igor Bauersima, for instance, the removal of Hamlet does not result in his erasure. On the contrary, Hamlet’s disappearance from the stage is accompanied by his recollection in the memory

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of the spectators who are able to fill in the gaps. The protagonist himself becomes a trace, and he continues to influence interpretation of the whole play. Moreover, deconstructive adaptations often depend on parody, and parody’s purpose, according to Linda Hutcheon, ‘is not to destroy the past; in fact, to parody is both to enshrine the past and to question it’ (1988: 126). This observation supports Hutcheon’s insistence on ‘double-voicing’ of postmodern literature (1988: 44), and it echoes what Graham Allen terms as its ‘double-codedness’ (2000: 188), that is the practice of exploiting and subverting available literary sources and modes of representation. Both the concepts of ‘double-voicing’ and ‘double-codedness’ emphasise the continuous cultural need to evoke already established works and paradigms of storytelling, particularly when confronting the legacy of the past. The importance of Hamlet ’s legacy for contemporary drama and theatre is reflected in the thematic and formal diversity of the plays and performances examined in the book. Some adaptations are situated inside the source to erode its dramaturgical and ideological principles from within. Stoppard refers to Hamlet to address fundamental ontological and epistemological issues, such as identity, ignorance, knowledge, and memory. In his Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Shakespeare’s tragedy functions as a supreme scenario, an equivalent of fate that predetermines the behaviour of the protagonists and leads them to death. Similarly, Alice Birch and Katie Mitchell employ Hamlet as a dominant and powerful script to portray mechanisms of patriarchal oppression in Ophelias Zimmer. Situating the spectators as uncomfortable witnesses of numbing repetition and violence against the eponymous heroine, they meticulously document persistent strategies of silencing and abuse of Ophelia. By contrast, Janusz Głowacki, Heiner Müller, and CREW refer to Shakespeare’s tragedy because it allows them to create alternative versions of politics and history that correspond to the experiences of the twentiethand the twenty-first-century audiences. Głowacki and Müller explicitly address the post-war division of Europe and the atmosphere of conspiracy, suspicion, and espionage during the Cold War. Głowacki portrays political struggles in a parody version of political thriller conventions, whereas Müller depicts history as an indifferent machine of death and destruction. CREW’s version, in turn, explores epistemic and political shifts in Shakespeare’s lifetime to shed light on present-day anxieties and doubts

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concerning ways of knowing and acting in the world. In all the three adaptations, while the artists question the perceptions of history, power, and revenge in the Renaissance era, they simultaneously express their deep fascination with the striking relevance of Hamlet ’s historical context for today’s audiences. Finally, deconstructive adaptations often engage with media both as topics and tools of theatre. La Ruina draws on Hamlet to criticise his local community that suffers from economic crisis and commercialisation of the Italian television. He challenges a traditional family model and conventional gender roles, while exposing the hypocrisy of a small town with its conservative values. Bauersima, in turn, evokes Shakespeare’s tragedy to comment on the twenty-first-century obsession with celebrity, fuelled by media corporations and consumerist society. Inspired by Warhol’s philosophy of art and his provocative artistic projects, the playwright reflects on the crisis of signification in popular culture. As this brief overview suggests, the deconstructive afterlife of Hamlet offers insights into broad tendencies in post-war European history, which since the 1960s has witnessed a series of social and political crises, as well as cultural and intellectual revolutions. The process of deconstructing Shakespeare’s tragedy has run parallel to these movements. It is not that the dramatists and theatre directors have deliberately set out to reveal flaws and inconsistencies in Shakespeare’s tragedy, but rather they have adopted general strategies of subversion and negation which have emerged in post-war European culture as part of postmodern turn. However, while Hamlet has been frequently adapted across centuries, some of the ideas and modes of behaviour associated with this play have been inevitably marked as outdated or obscure by twenty- and twentyfirst-century audiences. The Renaissance constructions of madness, providence, and poetic justice have given way to modern concepts of mental health and human fate. Our understanding of science, religion, and history substantially differs from that of Shakespeare. And yet he remains relevant because his works reflect a general sense of anxiety—which owes to an epochal shift from modern to medieval values in the sixteenth and seventeenth century—and which in turn powerfully resonates with postwar audiences. Consequently, Shakespeare’s influence on European drama and theatre cannot be denied, destroyed, or erased. Such adaptations as Müller’s The Hamletmachine and CREW’s Hamlet’s Lunacy, which are almost half a century apart, demonstrate that

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Shakespeare’s tragedy continues to be evoked in the context of groundbreaking experiments and transformations within European drama and theatre. In the 1970s, Müller’s short text revolutionised post-war playwriting practices as a bold attempt at revising the established modes of reading, writing, and making European theatre. In the 2010s, CREW’s exploration of mixed reality in live theatre introduced novel kinds of spatial and temporal frameworks in performance and new models of audience experience. Combining real and virtual environments, the company engaged the spectators as participants on several levels: emotional, intellectual, and kinaesthetic. It will be interesting to follow new versions of Hamlet to see if deconstructive tendencies in adapting this tragedy continue, and how they influence our understanding of Shakespeare. It would be also worthwhile to compare European deconstructions of Hamlet with approaches to this tragedy worldwide, particularly outside Western contexts, studying whether mechanisms of deconstruction might provide means of resistance to the practices of (post)colonialism, imperialism, and globalisation. The continuous emergence of new Shakespeare’s offshoots is inevitable. A deconstructive investigation of selected Hamlet adaptations reveals that to whatever ‘uses’ we may ‘return’ Shakespeare’s tragedy, it is bound to influence our thinking about drama and theatre, but also about history and culture in European and global contexts.

References Allen, Graham. 2000. Intertextuality. London and New York: Routledge. Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York and London: Routledge. Knight, G. Wilson. 1970. The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearean Tragedy. London: Methuen. Shakespeare, William. 2007. Hamlet. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. The Arden Shakespeare. Third Series. London: Thomson Learning. Whitaker, Thomas R. 1990. ‘Logics of the Absurd.’ In Critical Essays on Tom Stoppard, edited by Anthony Jenkins, 110–120. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co.

Index

A Actors Studio (New York), 95 Agamben, Giorgio, 118, 126, 131, 143 Alexander the Great, 227 Amleto ovvero Cara Mammina, 181 Anatomy of Suicide, 77 anthropological machine, 118, 126, 143 Arslan, Mesut, 149 Artaud, Antonin, 72, 121 B Barker, Howard, 36 Barthes, Roland, 47, 211 Baudrillard, Jean, 211, 221 Bauersima, Igor, 20, 23, 174, 179, 204, 228, 230 Becher, Iris, 78 Beckett, Samuel, 38, 48–50, 54, 66 Benassi, Memo, 182 Berlusconi, Silvio, 196–198 Besson, Benno, 130 Bierut, Bolesław, 97

Big Brother, 178, 187, 195, 197, 204, 207, 216 Birch, Alice, 21, 23, 32, 36–41, 67, 202, 229 Bitte Liebt Österreich, 215 body politic, 128, 143 Bogusławski, Wojciech, 99 Bonham Carter, Helena, 77 Boorstin, Daniel J., 211, 214 Bourgeois Art Gallery (New York), 129 Böwe, Jule, 78 Brahe, Tycho, 154, 155, 158 Brecht, Bertolt, 100, 132, 140, 141 Brešan, Ivo, 109 Brezhnev, Leonid, 98 Brook, Peter, 73, 97 burlesque, 10, 11, 50, 96, 101, 108, 110, 111, 182–184, 204

C Caesar, Julius, 227 Cold War, 40, 45, 229

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Mancewicz, Hamlet after Deconstruction, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96806-9

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234

INDEX

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 14, 15, 17, 18 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 154 CREW, 11, 21, 23, 119, 122, 123, 144, 149, 229, 230 Crouch, Tim, 36

Foucault, Michel, 107 Four Quartets , 48 FPÖ party, 216 Fräulein Julie, 77 Freud, Sigmund, 15, 18, 121, 175, 199

D Dali, Salvador, 132, 135 De Boeck, Christoph, 166 Donne, John, 153, 154 Doran, Gregory, 7 droll, 11 Duchamp, Marcel, 128, 129 Dudkiewicz, Thomas, 149, 150 Duyves, Keez, 149

G Galileo (Galileo Galilei), 153 Gassman, Vittorio, 182 Gertrude: The Cry, 36 Głowacki, Janusz, 20, 23, 32, 36, 37, 39–41, 93, 208, 229 Gob Squad, 215 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 15, 17, 18 Grotowski, Jerzy, 73 Gruda, Józef, 97

E Eco, Umberto, 197, 211, 213, 217, 221, 222 Eidinger, Lars, 74, 89, 92 Eisenstein, Sergei, 135 Eliot, T.S., 8, 13, 15, 17, 19, 36, 48, 63 Elizabeth I of England, 152, 157 EUX , 165 Everett Millais, John, 92

F Factory, 20, 23, 174, 176–178, 204 Featherstone, Vicky, 73, 74, 76, 85 fidelity and post-fidelity, 3, 7–9, 82, 93 Five Truths , 72, 73 foley, 90, 91 Forced Entertainment, 148, 149, 159, 160 Fortinbras Gets Drunk (Fortynbras si˛e upił ), 20, 23, 32, 36, 37, 39, 93, 208

H Haider, Jörg, 216 Hall, Peter, 38 Hamlet Encounters , 150 Hamletism, 18 Hamletmachine, The (Die Hamletmaschine), 6, 11, 19, 20, 23, 119, 150, 161, 184, 209, 230 Hamlet’s Lunacy, 11, 21, 23, 119, 144, 230 Hamlet’s Playground, 150 Hamlet wtóry, 18 Hands-on-Hamlet , 149, 150, 159, 164 Hardore di Otello, 181 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 47, 105, 106, 108, 140, 175, 176 Heidegger, Martin, 175 Henry VI: The Battle for the Throne, 72

INDEX

Hepburn, James (the 4th Earl of Bothwell), 156, 162 Hove, Ivo van, 75 Husserl, Edmund, 119

I idealisation, 121 Il Corpo delle Donne, 198

J James VI of Scotland and I of England, 152, 155–159, 161–163, 168 Jasielski, Józef, 39 Jaworski, Roman, 18 Jones, Ernest, 15, 18 Jong, Marijn Alexander de, 149 Joris, Eric, 148, 149, 155, 160–162, 164, 166

K Khrushchev, Nikita, 97 Killick, Jerry, 147, 149–151, 155, 156, 158–163 Kitsch Hamlet , 21, 23, 36, 174, 176–178, 207, 208 Köning, Jenny, 74, 88 Kundera, Milan, 178, 212, 219 KVS (Brussels), 150

L Laing, R.D., 199 Lamford, Chloe, 72–74, 80, 87, 91, 92 Lapelosa, Oriana, 201 La Ruina, Saverio, 15, 21, 23, 36, 174, 179, 207, 228, 230 Levinas, Emmanuel, 175 Lipinska, ´ Olga, 109

235

logocentrism, 12, 73, 87 Luca, Dario de, 188

M Magritte, René, 132, 135 Mario e Saleh, 181 Marx, Karl, 135, 136 masculu e fiammina, 181 Mastrota, Rosario, 188 mattatori, 182 Mediaset, 198 Metamorphoses , 62, 63 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 73 Miloševi´c, Slobodan, 98 Mitchell, Katie, 21, 23, 32, 36–41, 67, 202, 229 Monroe, Marilyn, 210, 212 Müller, Heiner, 6, 11, 15, 19, 20, 119, 122, 123, 150, 184, 185, 209, 229–231

N National Theatre (London), 48, 72 nonmatrixed representation, 160, 161

O Ofelia sin Hamlet, Una, 36 omni-directional video (OVD), 149, 164, 165 Onassis Kennedy, Jacqueline, 210 Ophelias Zimmer, 21, 23, 32, 36–39, 67, 110, 202, 229 orrery, 154 Ostermeier, Thomas, 74, 89, 92 Ovid, 62, 63

P Padre Pio (San Pio da Pietrelcina), 187

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INDEX

Papi´c, Krsto, 109 Pappenheim, Max, 90 pastiche, 40, 46, 49, 50, 100, 104, 108, 111 Pellicori, Fabio, 188 PIPS:lab, 149 Pirandello, Luigi, 38, 64 Platform 0090, 149 Po Hamlecie, 36 political thriller, 32, 40, 93, 98, 102, 229 Polvere, 181 Pop Art, 209, 210, 215 postdramatism, 51 postmodernism, 2–4, 6, 8, 11, 15, 19, 20, 37, 46, 51, 61, 105, 106, 111, 195, 207, 212, 221, 229, 230 post-structuralism, 5, 6, 19, 46, 47, 105, 106, 159 Practice as Research (PaR), 152 Predstava Hamleta u selu Mrduša Donja, 109 Premio Ugo Betti, 184, 188 Presley, Elvis, 210 psychoanalysis, 16, 18 Ptolemy, 154, 155 Q Quiles, Eduardo, 36 R Reagan, Ronald, 98 Regietheater (director’s theatre), 73, 75 revenge tragedy, 32, 53, 54, 128, 156, 157 Rimini Protokoll, 215 Romanticism, 3, 7, 14–19, 22, 38, 40, 81, 92, 99, 108, 121, 168, 179, 182

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, 6, 11, 20, 23, 32, 37, 38, 76, 82, 83, 107, 110, 208, 220, 229 Rosmair, Judith, 74 Rossi, Ernesto, 182 Royal Court Theatre (London), 71–75, 77 Royal Shakespeare Company (Stratford), 7, 38, 72

S Salvini, Tommaso, 182 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 105, 119, 120 Scena Verticale (Castrovillari), 181, 186, 191, 194 Schaubühne (Berlin), 19, 72, 74, 77, 89, 92 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 99 Schlingensief, Christoph, 207, 215, 216 Schuch, Renato, 91 Shakespeare, William King Lear, 6 Othello, 6 Sonnets , 6 Tempest , 7, 126 Titus Andronicus , 62, 63 Troilus and Cressida, 6 signified, 120 signifier, 120, 179 silkscreen printing, 210, 211, 224 slapstick, 95, 102 Smozewski, ˙ Ryszard, 39 Soviet Union, 2, 37 Spina, Giovanni, 188 Stable Gallery (New York), 129 Stalin, Joseph, 97, 141 Stanislavsky, Constantin, 73

INDEX

Stoppard, Tom, 6, 11, 20, 23, 32, 37–41, 76, 86, 107, 208, 220, 228, 229 Strindberg, August, 77 Striscia la Notizia, 197 structuralism, 120 Stuart, Henry (Lord Darnley), 156, 163 Stuart, Mary (Queen of Scots), 156, 162

T Taylor, Elizabeth, 210 Teatro Vascello (Rome), 181, 194, 199, 201 Teatr Telewizji (Warsaw), 109 Terry, Michelle, 72 Theatre of the Absurd, 3, 32, 37, 60, 67 The Description of a Picture, 131 The Joke, 178, 212 The Scab, 130 The Waste Land, 48, 63 Tieck, Ludwig, 99 Toneelacademie Maastricht, 148 Tractor, 135

U University of Exeter, 148

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University of Hasselt, 148 URLAND, 148, 149, 159 V V&A Museum (London), 72 velina, 197 Vogelaare, Livinus de, 156, 163 Volksbühne (Berlin), 130 W Waiting for Godot , 38, 48, 66 Warhol, Andy, 128–130, 207, 209–215, 222–224, 230 Warlikowski, Krzysztof, 75 Warminski, ´ Janusz, 39 Warner, David, 38 Wilde, Oscar, 48 Wilson, Robert, 142 Wyspianski, ´ Stanisław, 99, 100, 120 Y Young Vic (London), 19 Z Zanardo, Lorella, 198 Zawistowski, Roman, 97, 103 Zeffirelli, Franco, 77 ˙ Zurek, Jerzy, 36, 100