The Hamletmachine

12th & 13th February 2014

Stereo

THE HAMLETMACHINE is a collective experience. The pleasure in chaos. The joy in excess. The unleashing of insanity and the irrational. Finding a new weapon of not-knowing to lead the diseased knowledge to self-criticism. Exposing the cancer that devours the culture from within.
Heiner Müller allegorically breaks down and burns out the dramatic machinery of the cultural artefact of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. He calls his text the ’shrunken head of the Hamlet tragedy’ set at the ruins of our society where no substance for dialogue exists anymore because there is no more history.
Defined by Arlene Akiko Teraoka as the ’the articulation of the postmodern revolution’, THE HAMLETMACHINE labels itself as a product of our society openly reflecting the cultural influences which shaped it. In the words of the author it ’may be read as a pamphlet against the illusion that one can stay innocent in this our world.’ Quotes from Shakespeare’s play as well as T.S. Eliot, Andy Warhol, Coca Cola, Ezra Pound and Susan Atkins among others interwoven into the choral stream of consciousness convey a nostalgic yearning for a sense of meaning, a sense of genuine feeling now lost within a dead literary model. The text becomes but one element in the production, along with the physicality of the actors as well as audio and visual dimensions of live music and projections.

In theatre, as in the plague, there is a kind of strange sun, an unusually intense light by which the difficult, even the impossible, suddenly appears to be our normal element.
- Antonin Artaud

For thirty years Hamlet was a real obsession for me, so I tried to destroy him by writing a short text, Hamletmachine. German history was another obsession and I tried to destroy this obsession, this whole complex. I think the main impulse is to strip things to their skeleton, to rid them of their flesh and surface. Then you are finished with them.
– Heiner Müller

We shall not have succeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well. But the only way I can see of doing that is to use them to put up a lot of fine, well-designed buildings.
- Alfred Jarry