Directing the Hamlet Story in Hamlet—The Actor

Abstract

MJCompany’s production of Hamlet The Actor, the three actor version of Hamlet, was first staged in 2012 and won ‘the 1st Korea Shakespeare Awards’ for Best Young Director and Best Actress. The production was restaged with a new cast in 2013 and attracted the attentions of international Shakespearean scholars in particular, who were invited to attend the International Shakespeare Conference organized by the Shakespeare Association of Korea, delighted with this production as an eye-opener to them, and convinced that Hamlet can be adapted to a purely theatrical play without involving cultural concerns and political arguments. Hamlet The Actor portrays Hamlet as a player-director, rehearsing with two players his own play on revenge to overcome the state of dissociation and witnessing instead the disastrous effects his revenge might have on his beloved Ophelia. Directing the Hamlet story becomes not about whether to kill Claudius or not, but about whether to continue a rehearsal or not. The play’s adaptive strategy is the making of a classical work, that is, the collaboration between Hamlet and two players; it is characteristic of what distinguishes itself from a metadramatic device. Hamlet relies on the rehearsal process for the realization of his intentions and expects two players to make a creative contribution. Their collaborative work is characterized as a dynamic process of reshaping a classical work by means of stage production. The play’s circular and open-ended structure facilitates the dynamic process and stimulates the audience’s imagination to fill gaps in the story.