![\"cover\"](\"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/14\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2016\/10\/cover.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
By Octavian Saiu<\/strong> Reviewed by Patricia Keeney<\/strong>*<\/a> (Canada)<\/p>\n The madness of Hamlet has become the madness of the world, according to Romanian critic and scholar Octavian Saiu. That is, the sixteenth century theatrical invention of a prince feigning madness and our own century\u2019s mad global zeitgeist have inevitably collided. The difference for Saiu is that today, the madness is no longer pretense.<\/p>\n Saiu\u2019s thesis is based on three flagship productions of the play that stand out for him as beacons, each one shining light on important thinking in the contemporary theatre; productions that give insight into what is behind both the radical risk-taking and the philosophical responsibility of advanced theatre thinking in the USA, the UK and Germany.<\/p>\n Saiu\u2019s new book lays out arguments both graceful and courageous. He chisels them into precise chapters with provocative titles, such as \u201cDissident Hero in a Political Play\u201d and \u201cHamlet and Supermodernity,\u201d that represent a range of critical theatre watching, clear thinking, solid research and careful interpretation. Indeed, his fluid, critically astute prose is a joy to read in these days of so much linguistic obfuscation, writing that can often target a concept with arresting precision. He characterizes our century, for example, as one that boasts a \u201cdigital arsenal of alienation.\u201d<\/p>\n Introduced with a cunning little non-introduction, Saiu tries to assure us early on that \u201cthis is not a book about Hamlet<\/em> . . . rather it is an essay about three productions that seek to answer a question that has remained unresolved since the play first appeared: is Hamlet really mad or is he merely pretending?\u201d<\/p>\n The conventional idea of Hamlet as someone whose very survival in a society he rejects depends upon his feigning madness has also long been reinforced by the notion of this Philosopher-Prince as a creature of mysterious solitude. Indeed, the two ideas have long reinforced one another in production. Some of the most powerful political interpretations of the character have come from Eastern Europe where Hamlet truly inhabited (as Polish critic Jan Kott once argued) \u201ca rotten world.\u201d Yuri Lyubimov\u2019s famous 1971 production featured a \u201cflexible\u201d Iron Curtain of deceit and death in which \u201cHamlet recited the poem Hamlet<\/em> from the then still-censored novel Doctor Zhivago<\/em> while accompanying himself on a guitar.\u201d<\/p>\n Saiu reminds us that the Eastern European \u201cpolitical contextualization of Hamlet\u201d (both the play and character) can be contrasted with \u201cthe liberal intellectual\u201d approach seen in England and the USA. He concludes that \u201cIt was under the totalitarian regimes of the second half of the twentieth century that Hamlet could most easily pretend to be mad without actually sliding into madness,\u201d thereby allowing himself genuine \u201cfreedom of thought.\u201d<\/p>\n For Saiu, it is in the madness of the twenty-first century world that Hamlet loses his superstar status, falling from Harold Bloom\u2019s \u201csublime hero of the western canon\u201d to a gibbering fragmentation, subhuman and randomly destructive, our own tormented and lethal Frankenstein. It is we who have created this Hamlet. How? In our technological short-circuiting of natural rhythms, our response to collective guilt and in our thoughtless acquiescence to the psychopathic manipulation that is everywhere around us. This cocktail of contemporary derangements is what draws Saiu to the Hamlet <\/em>productions that are discussed here: Elizabeth Le Compte\u2019s production for New York\u2019s experimental Wooster Group (2006), Thomas Ostermeier\u2019s major production for the prestigious Schaub\u00fchne of Berlin (2008) and Ian Rickson\u2019s 2011 production for London\u2019s director-oriented Young Vic. Each is examined against its own cultural background before being moved into the broader picture Saiu paints.<\/p>\n The Wooster Group production was a creative deconstruction of the 1964 austere, soul-searching Hamlet<\/em> of John Gielgud; a production starring Richard Burton. LeCompte\u2019s version utilized visual recordings of the earlier Gielgud Hamlet <\/em>shown on multiple screens. The original production was already a stretch with Burton\u2019s interpretation of the title role a disturbing study in twitchy disorientation.<\/p>\n Taking advantage of technical glitches in the worn film, the Wooster Group opted for all things unhinged and out-of-control, as though working some Fast Forward, Pause and Rewind button to suggest they and we are all mad. The hyper-reality of the staging, the \u201csimulation of a non-existent reality\u201d showed us a world in fragments, part of a technological change in which we seem to be addictively inventing our own destruction.<\/p>\n For Saiu, Ostermeirer\u2019s Schaub\u00fchne production sees Hamlet <\/em>as a more human battleground of basic instincts, the sexual drive prime among them. It is this primitive element that throbs beneath the veneer of Ostermeier\u2019s civilization, the muck from which we try to rise and the muck into which we sink. Hamlet and company here slog around a stage of \u201cviscous mud,\u201d both womb and tomb, encompassing \u201cthe barbaric unconscious.\u201d There is no longer any distance to fall. For a mid-European director of Ostermeier\u2019s international reputation, the trampling of the Hamlet heroic is particularly significant.<\/p>\n Then there is the absurd, the basic condition of so many modern Hamlet<\/em> productions, \u201cin the crooked world of the communist East\u201d as well as in, what Saiu calls, \u201ctheatre of derision\u201d; approaches such as Stoppard\u2019s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead<\/em> and Heiner Muller\u2019s Hamletmachine<\/em>, in which Hamlet and Claudius are little more than versions of Beckett\u2019s Vladimir and Estragon. Ostermeier\u2019s approach, in this sense, becomes an example of, what Saiu calls, interior absurdity. Neither hero nor anti-hero, the German Hamlet is, instead, a non-hero trapped and battered by the brutally automatic reflexes of survival instincts. In this version, he literally crumbles as onstage screens reflect his mind gazing into a horror in which chaos and madness, theatre and reality become indistinguishable. Says Saiu: \u201cMore Shakespearean than any of the great classical productions, Ostermeier\u2019s Hamlet <\/em>pays homage to Shakespeare by staging a trial of madness in the courtroom of the theatre.\u201d<\/p>\n England\u2019s Young Vic contributes a socially innovative Hamlet. <\/em>Staged by Ian Rickson, this Hamlet<\/em> involves the audience itself in the process of realizing Rickson\u2019s directorial vision. Divided into two groups, spectators are \u201cguided through the backstage of the theatre into the lugubrious corridors of a psychiatric ward.\u201d The goal here is to get audience members to become entrapped in Hamlet\u2019s mind. Saiu suggests that this is perhaps the only vantage point for comprehending the play\u2019s modern relevance.<\/p>\n In Rickson\u2019s vision, Hamlet is the patient and Claudius the doctor, the latter spying on his charge through a glass wall. Within Hamlet\u2019s tortured mental state, we too suffer both oppression and resentment with him. A dehumanizing hospital atmosphere is created filled with screams and visions embedded into the walls themselves. It is inside this world that Hamlet directs his own play, finally revealing himself as both his father\u2019s ghost as well as Fortinbras.<\/p>\n In his madness, this Hamlet maintains agency, suggests Saiu, using Foucault\u2019s idea of madness\u2014a special status affording insight and perception denied to the rest of us. That is, Rickson locates this Prince somewhere between \u201cformless madness and ruthless discipline\u201d; \u201c[a] consummate strategist,\u201d who, because he really is mad, is able to carry out his own plans from inside his altered state. His madness becomes the play that is being staged by his own destructive self.<\/p>\n In Rickson\u2019s reading of the play, \u201cthe world itself is a mental institution,\u201d too easily and too often governed by psychopathic ideologues. The killing spree that happens takes place in the suffocating cauldron of an amoral universe in which no one cares about anyone or anything. Given that it is Hamlet\u2019s triumphant face that the audience sees at the last, Saiu concludes that this Hamlet\u2019s final impulse is simply \u201cthe thrill of survival.\u201d Indeed, he suggests that within any political system, it may be the victims who most subtly use one another, \u201creinforcing the presence of the pathological at the heart of everyday existence.\u201d<\/p>\n Saiu concludes that these three important productions indicate that Hamlet\u2019s madness is now everywhere\u2014from inmates inside the asylum to ideologues operating political systems to corporate bosses in the business world and that all are characterized by an anti-social sensibility and a readiness to abuse power. Today\u2019s Hamlet is all of us at war with ourselves. <\/em>\u201cI\u201d and \u201cOther\u201d for Saiu are now virtually indistinguishable in a world where \u201cto be\u201d and \u201cnot to be\u201d are simply equal opportunity temptations.<\/p>\n Hamlet and the Madness of the World <\/em>is a discerning and powerful book, with the imagination to see and the courage to say how, from every perspective, the fearless re-interpretation of this theatre classic can show us who we are.<\/a><\/p>\n
\n235 pp.\u00a0 Bucharest: Institutul Cultural Roman (in English)<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n![\"author\"](\"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/14\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2016\/10\/Author-150x150.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/88x31.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n