Two <i>Hamlets</i>: Wooster Group and Synetic Theater

Abstract

Perhaps more than any of Shakespeare s other plays, Hamlet carries with it weight of its past performance history. Different viewers will identify different productions as their definitive experience of play, but almost all viewers (and actors and directors) come to a performance of Hamlet with resonances of past. It is a play taught frequently to high school and undergraduate students, and taught increasingly alongside filmed and staged productions of play. There is surely very little blank slate left for play's reception a condition that reinforces Hamlet's central obsession with remembering and its querying of present's relationship to past. The play is full of sons called upon to avenge their fathers, and yet that vengeance is so rooted in past that it threatens future which of plays revenging sons are left alive to carry on their father's legacy? It's a danger both for Hamlet and for actors playing his role. The Wooster Group's Hamlet makes this pull of theatrical past main thrust of its production. The Wooster Group takes as its starting point not Shakespeare's play, but Richard Burton's 1964 film of Broadway production of play directed by John Gielgud and starring Burton as Hamlet, It's a crucial difference in origin, and one that starts to explain both Wooster Group's performance and newspaper critics' puzzled responses to that performance. The Program Note accompanying fall 2007 Public Theater production (the play was also workshopped in spring 2007 at St, Ann's Warehouse in New York) provides basic information about Burton experiment filmed in live performance with seventeen cameras and shown for only two days in movie theaters across country in a simultaneous performance of Theatrofilm via the miracle of Electronovision, It goes on to assert that this production attempts to reverse process, reconstructing a hypothetical theatre piece from fragmentary evidence of edited film, like an archeologist inferring a temple from a collection of ruins. Channeling ghost of legendary 1964 performance, we descend into a kind of madness, intentionally replacing our own spirit with spirit of another,1