Hamletmachine - Imploding fictions / Reviewed by Alexandra Müller

23rd June 2008

How do you delight an audience?

And other important questions raised by Imploding Fictions' Hamletmachine

One of the hardest things is getting people working in theatre excited by a performance. Especially with a text predicted to be “undirectable” like Heiner Müllers Hamletmachine. Alarm bells ring when two just graduating young directors from London do such a difficult piece.

But during Monday's performance at the Frascati Theatre of Hamletmachine directed by Imploding Fictions (Philip Thorne and Øystein Ulsberg Brager) the unlikely happened: an almost sold out hall of young directors, actors, dramaturges, producers etc. were absorbed by a complex, non-narrating one hour performance. How could that happen?

How could that happen?

Imploding Fiction’s version of Hamletmachine consists of two Müller pieces: Hamletmachine and Man in the elevator. It starts with the elevator piece: The two actors (Hannah Boyde and Samuel Metcalfe) dressed in formal black suits construct their own cage: a simple square of white tape. Captured in it and bound together by an extra-long tie they embark on an exhausting auditive journey through the text. It tells the story of a man on the way to his boss. He has given up all individuality and submitted himself to a system where only “work is hope”. The hypnotic choreography of the actors voices cleverly resembles the metaphoric machine in which the man in the elavator is trapped. The tie transforms throughout the scene, binding together man and woman, becoming a gallows and blindfold. It holds and chains at the same time. This directly leads to the first break in the performance: the tied up pair rips their bonds and is divided into “Hamlet” and “Ophelia”. The cold world of business loosens its grip, the cage of the elevator is destroyed, the suits are changed into Hamlet’s scrubby look and Ophelia’s white skirt and old-fashioned undergarments.

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

Deconstruction in a sandpit

Imploding Fiction’s Hamlet follows this deconstructing path. He finds some relics in his sandpit. For example an old transistor radio. It talks to him in different voices: those of old Shakespearian interpreters whose pathetic voices are quite amusing when contrasted to the listening apish boy in the sandpit: “I’m your father’s spirit!”. In contradiction to them a comedian jokes about what Hamlet’s family relations can teach us for real life. The Hamlet in the sandpit returns to Müller”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-like 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 verse 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 us “I’m not Hamlet.” And checks his mobile to see if he has any messages. From now on the deconstruction continues until the show ends with two little robots standing in a tiny elevator of tape and two actors dusting some glittering snow on them.

Metametametametameta

Müllers 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 production which not only analyses this meta-thinking, but is 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 Müller 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 destilates the essence of the whole performance to answer the question in the title,  some conclusions may be reached. 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 do you do theatre today? And what more can one expect from two young directors at the beginning of their careers?