17 years ago, the German director which he premiered at the head of the Berlin company Schaubühne. It immediately became a reference production in the history of theater, which has merit considering the number of versions of this Shakespeare classic that are created every year in the world. It is also important that the production is still being performed two decades later, after having visited thirty countries. But even more difficult: he has not aged at all. He has just demonstrated it again at the Teatre Municipal de Girona, where this weekend he inaugurated the Montaña Alta festival in style, with only two performances on Saturday and Sunday. Both full to the brim.
The staging continues to impress like the first day. Although perhaps it should be awarded halfway to Lars Eidinger, the actor who has been playing Hamlet since 2008, as the director himself acknowledged on Friday in a meeting with the press in Girona: “He is the current ‘owner’ of the myth. He carries it in his soul. And he wants to play it until he dies.” His is a clownish Hamlet, which at times seems like a showman humorous, far from the romantic figure of the prince tortured by the murder of his father and pretends to be crazy to carry out his plans. Ostermeier and Eidinger strip him of the cliché—and play with it—to present him as an egocentric, spoiled, misogynistic, brutal, rude, and artificially fat young man. A guy corroded by the thirst for revenge, who pretends to be crazy but at the same time is crazy and who seems capable of any arbitrariness. Seen in the current social and political context, it could be said to be almost visionary.
Seeing him in action is like discovering Hamlet for the first time: even if you know the plot by heart, it keeps you in suspense because you don’t know what he’s going to do in the next scene. It’s a credit to Eidinger: he seems to be improvising all the time. Although he obviously does not do it, the actor does allow himself some licenses. He interacts with the audience, puts blood sausages and plays with the fourth wall as he pleases. “He changes scenes every night without asking my permission,” Ostermeier joked on Friday. Always, yes, in absolute possession of his character.
Eidinger’s superb performance is one of the reasons for the success of the production after so many years. The other is the scenic approach. On the stage, covered in dirt, there are few elements: a large elongated table that moves closer or further away depending on the scenes and a chain curtain that serves both to mark spaces and as a screen on which recordings and live videos are projected. This is common in theaters today, but it was not so common in 2008. Also the use of microphones in many parliaments. Although the use of these resources goes beyond innovation: the important thing is that these projections add layers of meaning and amplify the madness that is unleashed on stage: blood, earth, water, violence and chaos planned to the millimeter. It is like the reflection of Hamlet’s mind.
Ostermeier, who in his meeting with the press acknowledged that over the years he has introduced modifications to some scenes, eliminates and rearranges several scenes from Shakespeare’s original. It begins, in fact, with a fragment of Hamlet’s sacred monologue “To be or not to be,” which will be repeated two more times during the performance, almost like a chorus, although interpreted in different ways. In this way, parliament is also desacralized.
The version reduces characters to focus on the main ones, played by six exceptional actors who double up in different roles, except Eidinger. It is not only an economic decision, but also an artistic one. That the murdered king has the same face as the murderous king enhances the feeling of madness. And the fact that the actress Magdalena Lermer, the only woman in the cast, plays both Hamlet’s mother and Ophelia and that she transforms into one or the other in the public eye has to do with Hamlet’s misogyny.
It is the second time that this Hamlet can be seen in Spain. The first at the Teatre Lliure in Barcelona. Then it was celebrated as an event, but surely few would imagine that almost twenty years later it would still be one. Does that mean that theater hasn’t evolved since then? The question is for a doctoral thesis, but one thing is clear: there are shows that mark a before and after in the history of the performing arts, and this is one of them.
