SCHAUBÜHNE AM LEHNINER-PLATZ
Berlin, Germany

HAMLET

author	WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
directed by	THOMAS OSTERMEIER
translation and dramaturgy	MARIUS von MAYENBURG
stage design	JAN PAPPELBAUM
costume design	NINA WETZEL
music	NILS OSTEDORF
video	SEBASTIEN DUPOUEY
light design	ERICH SCHNEIDER
stage combat	RENE LAY

performed by

Claudius; Ghost	URS JUCKER
Hamlet	LARS EIDINGER
Gertrude; Ophelia	JUDITH ROSMAIR
Polonius; Osric	ROBERT BEYER
Horatio; Guildenstern	SEBASTIAN SCHWARZ
Laertes; Rosencrantz	STEFAN STERN

Performance time: 2 hours 30 minutes. No intermission.

Shakespeare presents the Danish royal court as a corrupt political system which becomes a paranoid maze for Hamlet. Murder, betrayal, manipulation and sexuality are the weapons used in the war to preserve power. Not able to take on and fight the cynical rules of the game at the court, Hamlet stagnates and turns his aggressions against himself. His gift of distinguishing pros and cons becomes an insurmountable hindrance in accomplishing his goals, and as the last person with scruples in a system without any, he is finally doomed.

With its central paradox of the incapacitated protagonist, Hamlet remains today a valid analysis of the intellectual dilemma between complex thinking and political action. Shakespeare serves up over twenty characters, allowing a political biosphere to arise out of differing interests and intrigue. In Ostermeier’s production, only six actors will play all these characters, constantly changing roles. Hamlet’s progressive loss of touch with reality, his disorientation, the manipulation of reality and identity are mirrored in the acting style, which takes pretence and disguise as its basic principle.

It was in late 1601 or early 1602 that William Shakespeare (1564-1616) wrote his Tragic History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark for the actor that he especially admired, Richard Burbage. Accompanied by Maurius von Mayenburg, associate author at the Schaubühne of Berlin who translated and adapted Shakespeare’s text, Thomas Ostermeier began a journey through one of the brilliant English playwright’s key works. Here, on the brink of paranoid madness, in the grip of his visions, anxieties and incapacity to take a decision, to choose, to assume his status as a man and crown prince, Hamlet plays with, hides from and wants to manipulate those around him, concealing behind deliberately chosen madness a murderous plan supposed to save him, free him from the “putrid swamp” that surrounds him. Trapped by the court and the political world, when he becomes truly mad he turns against himself the weapons that ought to have served his liberation. Seeking honesty and truth in a universe where concealment and lies reign, Hamlet loses himself in his powerlessness to act, in a growing dilemma that overwhelms him and condemns him to death. To refocus Shakespeare’s work on its hero interpreted by Lars Eidinger, Thomas Ostermeier has selected a limited number of actors: six to play about twenty roles, favouring the scenes in which Shakespeare depicts, through the Danish court, a political system composed of murders, corruption and passions that serve the desire for power. It is impossible, Shakespeare seems to say, to allow room for the complexity of thought when you must act, and act quickly, politically. It is this inability to choose from the possibilities that makes Hamlet unfit for power and inexorably leads him to his death, itself a herald of the collapse of the Danish kingdom. Are we then so far from today’s questioning? Thomas Ostermeier asks himself and asks us. After Büchner and Sarah Kane, it is to Shakespeare that he turns to provide us with food for thought in a here and now full of areas of shade, uncertainties and a lack of landmarks.

Thomas Ostermeier

Thomas Ostermeier made a noteworthy debut in 1996 when he presented shows in a group of prefabricated structures abutting the Deutsches Theater, called the Baracke. Initially devoting himself to contemporary writings, he created an artistic collective around him that surprised and delighted the Berlin, and then the European public. Appointed co-director of the Schaubühne in Berlin in 1999, he continued his work but alternated texts from the repertory – Büchner, Brecht, Ibsen… – and contemporary authors – Marius von Mayenburg, Jon Fosse, Biljana Srbljanović, Sarah Kane, Lars Norén… Classic or modern, these plays are always integrated into the reality of a politically united but socially and culturally divided Germany, a fragmented Europe, confronted to with an attempt at a cultural invasion from across the Atlantic, from a world that cannot erase either conflict or the barbarism of its operating modes. In his artistic approach, Thomas Ostermeier, who was the associate artist of the 58th Festival d’Avignon, continues to propose a theatre that is as close to man as possible.