With Daimon Goro (First player/Second gravedigger), Fujiwara Tatsuya (Hamlet), Hira Mikijiro (Claudius/Ghost of Hamlet's Father), Hirota Takashi (Norwegian Captain), Hoshi Tomoya (Marcellus), Hori ...Genki (Lucianus), Juku Ikkyu (Cornelius/Priest), Mamiya Hiroyuki (Rosencrantz), Masafumi Senoo (Voltemand/Prologue), Matsuda Shinya (Bernardo), Mitsushima Hikari (Ophelia), Mitsushima Shinnosuke (Laertes), Noguchi Kazuhiko (Messenger), Ohtori Ran (Gertrude), Okada Tadashi (Osric), Seike Eiichi (Guildenstern), Shinkawa Masato (Francisco/The Dumb Show King), Sunahara Kensuke (Player Queen), Takao Taka (Polonius), Takeda Kazuaki (Player King), Teuchi Takamori (Sailor/The Dumb Show Poisoner), Uchida Kenshi (Fortinbras), Urano Shinsuke (Gentleman/The Dumb Show Queen), Yamaya Hatsuo (First gravedigger), and Yokota Eiji (Horatio). A dedication to giving his Japanese audiences a sense of shared cultural identity through his appropriations of Shakespeare, while still retaining a connection to the original text through striking visual imagery and a strong commitment to storytelling, has been the hallmark of Ninagawa's directorial career. Even if the full significance of this tableau was lost on the non-Japanese members of the audience, the stunning burst of color threw into relief both the dark "prison" (2.2.239) of Hamlet's Denmark and the seamy "luxury" (1.5.83) of Claudius's court. Prompted to contemplate philosophical questions about life and death as he approaches his eightieth birthday, Ninagawa posed the following question in his "Director's Note": "What will be left after the layers of life are peeled off?" His latest restrained and nuanced revival of Hamlet found its answer in King Lear: "the thing itself; unaccommodated man" (3.4.98-99).
Alienating Hamlet Sivefors, Per
Critical survey (Oxford, England),
12/2023, Letnik:
35, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Abstract
The protagonist of Jenny Andreasson's autobiographical novel
Teatern
(2022) is a young female director whose feminist production of
Hamlet
at the Swedish national stage fails to have its ...planned premiere. While the novel makes a point of describing the misogynist structures behind this failure, the present article suggests that class structures and precarity are the main reasons behind it. The financial difficulties of the theatre generate a clear discrepancy between cultural capital – embodied by Shakespeare's canonical play – and economic. The resulting precarious work situation is reflected in the protagonist's yearning for stability, in her recurring assertions of class privileges vis-à-vis her co-workers and in her increasing sense of alienation from both them and her own work. While not strictly paraphrasing Shakespeare's play, the protagonist invokes parallels to both Hamlet and Ophelia, and
Teatern
, instead of locating these parallels in an ‘existential’ reading of Shakespeare's play, anchors the theme of alienation in the economic and social strictures of the theatre institution.
Hamlet Fowler, Benjamin
Shakespeare bulletin,
12/2013, Letnik:
31, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
...in a choice reminiscent of Pina Bausch's Rite of Spring, a pit of soil covered the stage and, as became clear in the first ten minutes, functioned as old King Hamlet's graveyard. ...a wedding ...banquet table, also able to truck upstage and downstage over the graveyard, made manifest Hamlet's declaration that "the funeral baked meats / Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables" (1.2.179-80). ...Ostermeier began with Hamlet in close up, Eidinger's face projected in giant widescreen vitality onto the beaded curtain behind which the actors were assembled. ...he explicitly articulated his treatment of Shakespeare's play in terms of a poüticiz.ed "realism" that resisted the "idealistic" view of Hamlet traditionally taken by artists.
Hamlet’s Arab journey Litvin, Margaret; Litvin, Margaret
2011., 20111003, 2011, 2012-01-01, Letnik:
30
eBook
For the past five decades, Arab intellectuals have seen themselves in Shakespeare's Hamlet: their times "out of joint," their political hopes frustrated by a corrupt older generation. Hamlet's Arab ...Journey traces the uses of Hamlet in Arabic theatre and political rhetoric, and asks how Shakespeare's play developed into a musical with a happy ending in 1901 and grew to become the most obsessively quoted literary work in Arab politics today. Explaining the Arab Hamlet tradition, Margaret Litvin also illuminates the "to be or not to be" politics that have turned Shakespeare's tragedy into the essential Arab political text, cited by Arab liberals, nationalists, and Islamists alike.
Västanå Teater's 1996 Hamlet Swärdh, Anna
Critical survey (Oxford, England),
12/2023, Letnik:
35, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Abstract
Hamlet
opens on a question – ‘Who's there?’ – asked by a sentinel of Elsinore Castle. In the Swedish regional theatre company Västanå Teater's 1996 adaptation of the play, the question kept ...returning, and it became symbolic of the production's focus on the uncertain and seemingly mysterious movements of political power. This article explores how changes to plot and text worked together with various forms of stylisation to present a society in which strict hierarchies of class, age and gender operated in tenson with Machiavellian corruption and theatrical seeming. Borrowing localised aesthetic expressions from several traditions and cultures (Norwegian/Nordic, Icelandic, East-Asian, Italian/European), the production adapted
Hamlet
to speak to local concerns, while simultaneously highlighting themes and issues present in the play.
This monograph offers a detailed consideration of the five-volume novel written by Cao Xueqin and translated into English as The Story of the Stone, when read through William Shakespeare’s drama ...Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, A Tragedy in Five Acts. The book builds on the superlative David Hawkes/John Minford English language translation, which is inspired by resonances between the English Shakespearean literary heritage and the dynasties-old Chinese literary tradition inherited by Cao Xueqin. The Introduction sets out the potential for the significant cultural exchange between these two great literary works, each an inexhaustible inspiration of artistic and scholarly re-interpretation. Two chapters bring into consideration two universal literary themes: patriarchy – filial obedience and family honour, and tragic romantic love. These chapters are structured so that a key episode in Hamlet provides the initial perspective, which is then carried through to an episode in The Story of the Stone which offers points of complementarity: in-depth interpretation draws on inter-textual, historical and contemporary contexts referenced from the immense body of scholarly research which has accumulated around these iconic works. The third chapter proposes a new reading of the problematic ‘shrew’ character in the novel, Wang Xi-feng, through tracing the similarities of the structure of the narration of her life and death with a Shakespearean five-act tragedy.
Abstract
Shakespeare's
Hamlet
has been retold in children's versions several times in Sweden in recent years. It was the subject of the first episode of the children's television programme
På teatern
...At the Theatre, written and directed by Christina Nilsson for SVT in 2001–2002, where Shakespearean actors meet their child or grandchild backstage after a performance to tell and partly enact the story of the play. In 2005–2006, Lotta Grut wrote the plays
Lille Hamlett och spöket
Little Hamlett and the Ghost and
Offelia kom igen!
Offelia Come Again! for the theatre company Unga Roma. In these fairy-tale versions, the children Hamlet and Ophelia are confronted with death, grief, anger, oppression and erasure. This article argues that the
På teatern
episode is an adaptation of
Hamlet
while Grut's two plays are appropriations.
Performing Hamlet Croall, Jonathan
2018/01/01, 2018, 2018-08-23
eBook
Hamlet is arguably the most famous play on the planet, and the greatest of all Shakespeare's works. Its rich story and complex leading role have provoked intense debate and myriad interpretations. To ...play such a uniquely multi-faceted character as Hamlet represents the supreme challenge for a young actor. Performing Hamlet contains Jonathan Croall's revealing in-depth interviews with five distinguished actors who have played the Prince this century: Jude Law: 'You get to speak possibly the most beautiful lines about humankind ever given to an actor.' Simon Russell Beale: 'Hamlet is a very hospitable role: it will take anything you throw at it.' David Tennant: 'No other part has been so satisfying. It was tough, but utterly compelling.' Maxine Peake: 'Hamlet was a way of accessing bits of me as an actress I've not been able to access before.' Adrian Lester: 'Working with Peter Brook on Hamlet changed me as an actor, and for the better.'The book benefits from the author's interviews with six leading directors of the play during these years: Greg Doran, Nicholas Hytner, Michael Grandage, John Caird, Sarah Frankcom and Simon Godwin. Many other productions are described, from those starring Michael Redgrave, Alec Guinness and Paul Scofield in the 1950s, to the performances of Benedict Cumberbatch, Andrew Scott and Paapa Essiedu in recent times. The volume also includes an updated text of the author's earlier book Hamlet Observed, and an account of actors' experiences of performing at Elsinore.
BENJAMIN’S HAMLET White, Joel
Angelaki : journal of theoretical humanities,
12/2018, Letnik:
23, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This article argues that Walter Benjamin’s aesthetico-political philosophy cannot be understood without reconsidering Hamlet. It elucidates Benjamin’s Hamlet via his theory of Baroque “mourning” and ...its counter-measure, the “Saturnine Dialectic.” It likewise offers an analysis of the 1877 Herman Ulrici edition of Hamlet, the German edition Benjamin cites exclusively. This analysis reconciles the differences in the secondary literature regarding Benjamin’s Hamlet, expounding upon the edition’s singular use of the word “foreordination” (Fügung). Finally, by rereading Benjamin’s Hamlet through Carl Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba, it argues that Fortinbras’s succession, effectuated by Hamlet’s dying voice, conditions the repetition of sovereignty in Hamlet, betraying the emergence of the new. Despite this betrayal, the revolutionary potential that is sunken into the content of Hamlet is disjunctively brought to the surface by examining the “dialectical image” of Laertes’s rebellion, rescuing what I term the revolutionary-new from the jaws of defeat.
