Two reviews - standard newspaper style and magazine style. Comments invited.
1.
Hamlet
by William Shakespeare. Schaubühne Berlin directed by Thomas
Ostermeier. Sydney Festival at the Sydney Theatre, Walsh Bay, January
8-16, 2010. In German with surtitles.
Mud, mud,
(in-)glorious mud. What a difference from Australia’s own Hamlet on Ice
or the British traditional Laurence Olivier film that my generation was
brought up on. This Hamlet really is mad, with lucid moments, in grief
at the death of his father. Madder as he realises what his mother has
done and what women may do under a man’s control. Mad with anger and
thoughts of revenge against his uncle, the murderer. Mad with fear that
he may destroy the innocent Ophelia, with regret that he has killed her
father, assuming Polonius to be King Claudius behind the arras. Mad at
himself for not knowing how to take action, when, or what to do.
When
the end comes, alone in the mud of the graveyard, we understand what
“The rest is silence” means. At last, his death is a relief for Hamlet,
and felt by the audience to be a kind of triumph. As the stage
switched to black, in silence, the applause exploded, calling the cast
back 5 times when I was there to express appreciation for the artistry
of this production.
A surprising feature of this
adaptation, which includes occasional modern language, topical
references and even improvisation as Hamlet directly addresses his
audience (characters in the play and us in the auditorium) is the
humour. Shakespeare built this in to the gravedigger and Polonius, but
Ostermeier and the translator Marius von Mayenburg have dared to show
how watching a mad person is often very funny. The mood switches from
zany wild clowning to humour which suddenly becomes very black, and
again to terrible feelings of complete breakdown. Though Lars Eidinger
as Hamlet has received most publicity, all the cast are entirely in
control of their work in this highly expressionistic mode. Judith
Rosmair’s scene as the broken Ophelia, hardly able to articulate her
words, was just extraordinary. How different in style from the past is
this performance, but how true it seems to be to Shakespeare’s
intentions.
To bring, or not to bring this production
to Australia may once have been the question, but the Schaubühne company
prove the answer to be absolutely in the positive.
2.
Hamlet
by William Shakespeare. Schaubühne Berlin directed by Thomas
Ostermeier. Sydney Festival at the Sydney Theatre, Walsh Bay, January
8-16, 2010. In German with surtitles.
The essential
question of any theatre production is Hamlet’s: to be, or not to be.
The answer for Schaubühne is about whether their adaptation can be seen
as true to Shakespeare’s intentions, as well as create a genuine
response from a modern audience. Being chosen for the Sydney Festival
also raises the question of translation from Berlin to Australia, Sydney
in particular.
The answer is in the positive on all
three counts, in my view, but you need to know more. Taking the last
first, Lars Eidinger, playing Hamlet, is quoted in the Sydney Morning
Herald, saying that his use of improvised dialogue directly to the
audience and of the humour in this version has a quite different effect
in Berlin than in Sydney. In Germany he does not talk directly to those
watching, and he thought people there laughed only to show themselves
to be with it. In Sydney, the laughter is a genuine response, and it
was clear to me (on Tuesday January 12) that the enjoyment of the
business of theatre flowed fast between audience and actors, however
fashionably dressed up Sydney people can be. Eidinger talked of
“insight”, and I agree that Sydney audiences have a sophisticated
appreciation of theatre which has grown over the past several decades.
(Aside: see SMH Letters to the Editor, Friday January 15, for a
contrasting view.) Translating the words and the action from Berlin to
Sydney has been not just successful, but has brought out the best at
both ends.
Oddly perhaps, I thought the surtitles
showing Shakespeare’s original text was a brilliant Brechtian idea. We
picked up the feeling from the sound of the German, the physical action
and the live camera images while we also saw the words. I don’t know if
the result was deliberate, but the ‘literalisation’ created exactly the
right degree of ‘alienation effect’, allowing us to be both
participants in the emotion and observers understanding the significance
of the ideas. Perhaps in Berlin they should perform in English with
surtitles in German, although I was conscious that the rhythm and
cadences of Shakespeare’s language do not translate well into a
different set of words and sentence structures.
This
production takes literally Shakespeare’s emphasis on earth and nature,
as against the unnatural and dysfunctional. The main part of the stage,
thrust towards the audience, is covered in soil which, when wetted by
characters holding garden hoses to represent Danish rain, turns into
slippery mud. What this material actually is I don’t know, considering
that actors buried their faces in it and apparently were still able to
breathe, but the symbolic import was very clear. Earth, and nature, are
unforgiving rather than being the sort of ideal harmonious environment
that has become the fashionable view since the Romantics held sway.
Hamlet
is shown to be justifiably mad, in the sense that although he knows he
is behaving madly, everything that has happened around his father’s
death and what happens as the play progresses goes against any
possibility of his being able to direct events or control his life.
This version concentrates on his personal and the local political life,
leaving out Shakespeare’s wider political concerns about the forthcoming
invasion by Fortinbras from Poland, except at the very end when we hear
the drums of the approaching army to heighten the tension as all but
Horatio die. I thought it would have been better to have left even this
reference out, because the collapse of Denmark’s ruling elite was
obvious enough in any case.
Shakespeare himself may
well have not used all the material he wrote. I suspect the final
gathering together of the whole script, I think in 1604, was probably in
defence against others pinching his script – perhaps an early attempt
at proving copyright ownership – but the result is more than four hours
long and loses focus when what’s going on outside Denmark has to be
covered.
So I conclude that the Schaubühne company
have been true to Shakespeare’s central concerns. They also come from a
long tradition, in my view beginning essentially from Erwin Piscator’s
productions from the 1920s, of using expressionist techniques to open up
theatre to the expansion of ideas in some degree in contrast to the
‘naturalism’ of the late 19th Century (which is still popular today).
Schaubühne began in 1962, only a few years before Piscator died (still
directing theatre in Berlin after his sojourn in the US during the Nazi
period), and it seems to me they have continued and developed that
tradition, which is much more in tune with Shakespeare’s
‘presentational’ theatre than with naturalism. This explains why this
production is far superior to the ‘psychological angst’ versions that we
have become familiar with (and also shows that Freud in his use of both
the Oedipus and the Hamlet dramas got things out of kilter).
I
think Schaubühne got the art into kilter, however much Hamlet’s world
falls apart. This is why the audience responded so well when I saw the
play, their applause bringing the cast back on stage five times for
bows.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
