Imploding Fictions' Blog » Junge Regie

Hamletmachine in Amsterdam, reviewed for INSTED by Alexandra Müller

Øystein — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 12:03:24 +0000

How to get an audience delighted?

And other important questions raised in Imploding Fiction’s Hamletmachine

Written by Alexandra Mueller

One of the hardest things is to get people working in theatre excited by a performance. Especially with a text predicted to be “undirectable” like Heiner Muellers Hamletmachine. And especially when two just graduating young directors from London do such a piece.
But in Mondays performance at the Frascati Theatre of Muellers piece directed by Imploding Fictions (Philip Thorne and Øystein Ulsberg Brager) it just happened: nearly one hall of largely young directors, actors, dramaturges, producers etc. got caught by a complex, non-narrating one hour performance. How could that happen?

How could that happen?

Imploding Fiction’s Hamletmachine is built out of two Mueller pieces: Hamletmachine and Man in the elevator. It starts with the elevator piece: The two actors (Hannah Boyde, Samuel Metcalfe) dressed in formal black suits building their own cage: an easy square of white tape. Captured in it and bound by an extralong tie they start an exhausting auditive journey through the text. It tells the story of a man on his way to his chief. He has given up every individuality to work in a system where only “work is hope”. Really working is the artwork of the two actors, the hypnotizing choreography of their voices turns into the metaphoric machine, the man in the elevator is only one small part. The tie becomes a metaphor: the bounding of the man and the woman is a gallows, a blindfold, it holds and it chains at the same time. This directly leads to the first break in the whole performance: the bounded pair rips their band and is divided into “Hamlet” and “Ophelia”. The cold world of business is loosened, the cage of the elevator is destroyed, the suits were changed into Hamlet’s scrubby look and Ophelia’s white skirt and her old-fashioned underwear.

Mueller’s Hamlet is transmuted into an animal. A mixture of an ape and a parrot, struggling with Muellers text, a lonely explorer in a child’s sandbox. Hamletmachine is only 8 pages long, but it deals with nearly everything: Not only Shakespearean drama but also European history, communism and Mueller’s predicted helplessness of the intellectual individual in the 20th century.

Deconstruction in a sandbox

Imploding Fiction’s Hamlet follows this deconstructing path. He finds some relics in his sandbox. For example an old transistor radio. It talks to him in different voices: those of old Shakespeare interprets whose pathetic voices are quite amusing in contrast to the listening apish boy in the sandbox: “I’m your father’s spirit!”. In contrary to them a comedian jokes about what Hamlet’s family relations can teach us for real life. The Hamlet in the sandbox comes back again to Mueller”s text: asking, screaming, suffering – and also laughing about what pathetic inquiry this Hamlet is longing for. Can any living today just stand stuff like that? The question culminates in an unbearable tinnitus-alike bleep. What also cannot be missing: the skull. There are two covered by sand: a realistic one and one of plastic, blinking blue in Hamlets hand, while Ophelia finishes changing her clothes.

Ophelia is full of little tragic moments, her quiet dark voice fills the whole room, while she plays with nothing but a glass of water. She moves between being a woman, a child and a puppet when she burns a letter with some Shakespearian Hamlet lyrics and when she drips some blood into her glass of water, thinking about herself, “the woman at the gallows”.

And then the turning starts again, the whole performance transforms into a metaplay. The actors step out of their roles drinking some water to refresh themselves, Ex-Hamlet tells with Mueller “I’m not Hamlet.” And just checks if he has any messages. From now on the deconstruction continues until the show ends with two little robots standing in a little elevator made of tape and two actors dusting some glittering snow on them.

Metametametametameta

Muellers Hamletmachine is a secret, it reflects on its own cryptical style, its protagonist talks about being Hamlet and being an actor, he tears up a picture of the author and the author himself seems to talk about all that is going on in his head. This metametameta postmodern style of questioning and being is transferred into a one hour play which is not only analyzing this meta-thinking existence but also funny, emotional and beautiful at the same time. Like the text itself it tries to reveal the layers of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, of its own existence and of theatre itself.

From one “act” of Imploding Fiction’s Hamletmachine to the next one layer after the other is taken off, like the costumes of the actors. First there is the elevator piece, this well directed artistic voice challenge, then everything is transformed into Hamletmachine’s two broken figures – invented by Heiner Mueller and in their great individual ways interpreted by the actors. Third the former characters become actors/directors by themselves, talking about playing Shakespeare, being authentic etc. Then the media (used in a theatrical way) start to be instruments of exploring how more or less modern techniques conquer the stage: Former Hamlet talking in his mobile phone, former Ophelia listening, former Hamlet going out, coming back without a phone, but his voice still sounds through the phone, which is placed next to a microphone. Former Hamlet having a Dictaphone, recording himself, placing it beside the mobile phone beside the microphone. His voice doubled, tripled and overlayed by another radio and so on.

Some answers to find

If one distillates the essence of the whole performance to answer the question in the title, he’ll come to some points. First: Have the courage to do a difficult, challenging text. Unreadable, undirectable when it comes to questions of narrative, of understandability.
Second: Take two pretty good actors, who seem to like the text, like their “roles”, the play with roles and themselves.
Third: Have again the courage to invent your own magical, ironical, beautiful pictures and to use ambiguous metaphors – while knowing what they mean to you and knowing they are ambiguous. (Although if the furthered theatre around you – as it was discussed in the following talk – is quite narrative and often kind of conservative.)

One can like it or hate this piece – but he or she has to confess, that this Hamletmachine is a work of two directors who really know what their question was to the text, to their actors and to the medium itself. An aesthetic and intellectual statement and at the same time a personal answer to the question: How to do theatre today. And what more can one expect from two young directors at the beginning of their careers?
HAMLETMACHINE
TEXT: Heiner Mueller
DIRECTORS: Philip Thorne, Øystein Ulsberg Brager
ACTORS: Hannah Boyde, Samuel Metcalfe
LIGHTING DESIGN AMSTERDAM: Thomas Wheildon

Imploding Fictions in Hamburg

Øystein — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 17:16:33 +0000

Together with INSTED we were invited to the Körber Studio Junge Regie 2008 in Hamburg, Germany’s annual symposium for young directors. We lived in a place just of the Reeperbahn (probably the most decadent street in Europe), but even so nightlife was eclipsed by a full on schedule that seemed devised to test even the toughest theatre junkie.

The regular programme: show for breakfast, four hour afternoon debate about the previous shows, supper (this was invariably soup), first play of the evening followed by an audience discussion, second play of the evening followed by an audience discussion, then a ‘party’ (which was another play, only this time you were allowed to bring in a glass of wine).

So, this was the ‘basic programme’ around which were scheduled a series of special events, shows, talks and debates, including a lecture with postdramatic theatre gurus Hans Thies Lehmann and Heiner Goebbels.

By the end of six days we had seen nineteen shows. You can read the previous sentence again if you like.

Being invited to the Körber Studio Junge Regie in Hamburg is equivalent to being waved onto a roller-coaster escapade through the current trends of contemporary German theatre. It would be an interesting sociological experiment to force Charles Spencer through the experience. My guess is that he’d explode in a fit of indignation.

With neat regularity Spencer accuses people like Katie Mitchell of ‘smashing up the classics’, taking ‘outrageous liberties’ and ‘not serving the intentions of the dead playwright’ (actual quotes!!!) On evidence of Körber Studio 2008 faithfully reconstructing classics is certainly not what German theatre is about. It dismantles them, reconfigures them into new constellations, probes them for contemporary relevance or exposes ideological clashes with current thinking. The productions we saw of Woyzek, Hamlet, Hedda Gabler and Elektra were not attempts at reconstructing Büchner, Shakespeare, Ibsen or Hoffmansthal but rethinking them and their themes from a 21^st century standpoint. A central figure at the core of German (and most European) theatre is the ‘dramaturge’. When the term crops up it in Britain it is usually in reference to someone who acts as a kind of script supervisor on new writing. But on the continent dramaturges work on classic plays, they research previous drafts, influences etc. and then, together with the director, determine the structure and strategy for a new production (in Britain we’d say adaptation) of it. The constant accompaniment of the dramaturge and the resulting intellectual rigour in theatrical debates was one of the first striking features of our visit to Hamburg.

The other one (really not wanting to be stereotypical, but hey) was that German tea is a fucking disgrace. You get presented with a glass (!) of warm water into which you are expected to dunk a tea bag. And when Oystein asked for tea with milk the guy behind the bar (after an initial period of confusion) held it under the coffee machine and filled it up with frothy milk.

A rather novel aspect of the festival was that it was accompanied by students of criticism (in Germany you study to become a critic) as well as the students of directing, dramaturgy and acting. The critics joined the directors’ internal discussions and debates on the shows we had seen and then read out and discussed their reviews with the artistic teams under discussion present. This meant that the practitioners had an opportunity to give direct feedback to the critics and vice versa. It was a great idea to bring these two stereotypically polarised fronts together and engage in mutual debate.

Christa Müller, a dramaturge at the Thalia showed us around the Thalia Theater which made us green with envy: two rehearsal stages which are exact replicas of the main stage (minus the auditorium) a firmly employed ensemble of actors on a regular salary and a current repertoire of fifty three (!!!) plays!

Our stay in Hamburg was really inspiring and we met some great people – we thank the Thalia Theater, the Körber Stiftung and INSTED for inviting us, and we hope to return to Germany again soon (maybe next time with a production…) Next week we’ll be back in London.