It's Hamlet, but not as we know it.
Heiner Muller's nine-page play, Hamletmachine, does name-check the core characters but his lava flow of words, charged with an anger that ranges from the lascivious to the petulant, the resentful to the nihilistic, seems to pivot on the notion that "the time is out of joint..."
That concept, in an echo of the tensions Muller saw in his native Germany (still, in the 1970s, partitioned between East and West) foments visions of revolution that extend way beyond Hamlet's Denmark. By the end, communism and feminism have also come under fire from Muller's pent-up aggression and snarling, hectic invective. It's fierce, annihilating and unnerving.
Director Max Legoube, however, has found other resonances in Muller's work and it is these, particularly the transitory – yet oddly repetitive – nature of human life (and societies) that emerge through the melancholy shadows and potent iconography used in his Compagnie Sans Soucis production. Three black-clad figures melt in and out of moments evoked by the voiced-over monologue. Masks and projections filter in details of Hamlet's outrage, but even as he rails graphically against womankind, his conflict becomes the stuff of political schism and the stage fills with tiny black cut-outs of everyday humanity.
New brooms will sweep them all away. What lingers, however, is the dark poetry created by Legoube out of smoke and light, pale flesh and water. Even soap is the stuff of puppetry in his hands. A commendably bold, richly imaginative start to the Manipulate visual theatre festival.
HHH
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