There is probably no other text for the theatre that’s been written and argued about more than Hamlet. The tragedy of a prince that just wanted to take a quick break in his semester abroad for his father’s funeral – but ended up in a vortex of violence, corruption and deception, and became a murderer – focuses on religion, death, philosophy, guilt, in short, on »to be, or not to be«. So it’s a size too big for the little Gorki, right? Christian Weise presents the Container version of Hamlet as a play about a lopsided reunited Germany, the comedic B-side of overwhelmingly vast material that, in the end, is perhaps simply the story of two unequal families that live together but cannot come together.
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Premiere on 1/February 2020
Photo: Esra Rotthoff
Stage Photos: Ute Langkafel
»Christian Weise’s Hamlet breathes fresh life into an overdone tragedy. It’s a stylistically ambitious, playfully postdramatic and intellectually interesting approach to Shakespeare’s most-performed play – making it a must-see production.«
»Particular highlights are Aram Tafreshian’s stonecold, intense performance as Claudius and Svenja Liesau’s Hamlet, who replaces Shakespearean soliloquies with Gorki-standard out-of-character rants, here caricatured in an exaggerated Berliner dialect with icks and juts aplenty. Jens Dohle delivers a masterful soundtrack that flips from eerie xylophone scores to epic emo-chords on command whenever Liesau yells ›genre change!‹ Overall, Weise delivers a refreshing, self-reflexive piece that is both surprisingly faithful and daringly innovative.«