Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 11 Number 3, December 2010
___________________________________________________________________
THOMAS OSTERMEIER'S HAMLET AT KRONBORG CASTLE
I sinned against one of Europe's theatre gods this evening
leaving his show halfway through and now I fear the consequences
what must I do to propitiate? How can I ever again be seen as a connoisseur
who's best pleased when things are hard to understand. But the simple fact is
I was driven by boredom. I could no longer sit and attend to - not
nothing, there was all too much of something
I got my 345 Danish Kroner's worth though in the first few minutes
Hamlet's videography at the top projected onto a curtain of see-through
strands as he moved behind it and recorded himself and the five others
in character, followed by the funeral of old Hamlet when the gravedigger
in a Karl Valentin-esque routine ended up in the grave along with the casket
more than once all the while another actor provided bathetic rain via garden hose
and Gertrude waited for a scoopful of earth to throw in. These lazzi turned
the set's vast steel box of dirt into a sandbox for an evening of fun with death
that all stopped as we went to the drunken wedding reception
belching with bursts of hysterical histrionic rage
here was the first instance of contempt mixed with pleasure, that corroding
cocktail dissolvent of souls. But that was it. We never got further. The rest was
repetition - as if to mock the god Philip Glass. What Ostermeier seems to have
seen in the play is true and death may reasonably be preferred to being
under the influence of bullshot
by the time Ophelia with her little-girl voice entered to reveal
Hamlet's supposed secret love sickness I began my descent
down the bleachers and so from me the rest must be silence