Director – Tony McCleane-Fay
Playwright – Heiner Müller
Director’s Synopsis of Piece:
Never was there a tale of more woe than that of Hamlet and Ophelia… their violent, ill-fated and abusive relationship forms the backbone of Hamletmachine. Set in Elsinore, a place of purgatory, the play is an abstract and fragmented appropriation of Hamlet, taking the familiar and creating a free-fall down the rabbit hole into a non sequitur suspension of duplicated Hamlets and Ophelias with a Gertrude and Claudius thrown in for extra conflict and sexual tension.
My Interpretation of HamletMachine:
This piece is the only one in my repertoire which was not performed within the context of UCC Dramat. This piece was performed by second year students of the Drama & theatre Studies Course University College Cork. This, taking the other pieces I am interpreting into consideration, was the darkest piece of theatre and demanded the most from its audience. In saying that I found the piece to demand the right amount from its audience and did not apologise for what it put forward. The structure of the piece was quite interesting. The first twenty five/thirty minutes were a summarised version of Hamlet with the stage directions of the charcters being announced by a narrator. The general tone of the piece at this point is light hearted. Even with the amount of death in Hamlet it was done in such a comedic way with the bodies of the ‘dead’ characters staying in the space until eventually there was hardly any space left. At the end point of this the true core of Hamletmachine begins. The piece places itself back in modern day with the help of multimedia: projections of day to day society, political slogans, sexual imagery, disfigured images etc. Immediatly the tone of the piece turns much darker and the audience is uncertain where the piece is going to go. What ensues is a barrage of messages and metaphors ranging from feminism and domestic abuse to gender swapping and suicide. The piece is non apologetic,no topic is fully discussed before moving on to the next. I found the production elements to be a physical representation of the piece.See the you tube slideshow below to view production shots.
The production elements were strikingly beautiful and dark mirroring the dialogue and subject matter of the drama. Several striking moments of beauty were created throughout the performance forcing the audience to surrender to the piece and fully emerge themselves in what was happening in that moment. The nature of the piece is suited to a large group of actors to allow more versatility and change within the piece. All of the actors carried forward the characters they played in the summarized version of Hamlet to the ‘Machine’ part of piece creating the question of “what if?”. All of the cast played a multitude of roles causing the audience to associate more with what the character was saying rather than actor played a role. Overall the production is one that sticks with you long after you leave the theater and most definitely provides food for thought.
Literary Links 