"My main interest when I write plays is to destroy things," wrote German iconoclast Heiner Muller, as quoted in Theatremachine, Marc von Henning's English-language translation of Muller's most essential works.

"For thirty years Hamlet for me was an obsession, so I wrote a short text, Hamletmachine, with which I tried to destroy Hamlet. German history was another obsession, and I tried to destroy this obsession, too, that whole complex. I think my strongest impulse is to reduce things down to their skeleton, to tear off their skin and their flesh. Then I'm finished with them."

With this in mind, no wonder the two productions of Muller's post-modern rewiring of Shakespeare seemed to Max Legoube of French puppet theatre company Compagnie Sans Soucis so wrong-headedly violent. Legoube's take on things, which opens this year's Manipulate visual theatre festival at the Traverse in Edinburgh, aims to redress the balance with a ravishing multi-media approach that cuts through Muller's brooding dissections of Marxism and feminism to explore the frailty of existence in close-up.

"It surprised Max just how aggressive these productions were," says Deborah Lennie, who acts as translator for Legoube, who sits alongside her. "So when he first saw these productions he hated the text. Then when he read the text himself, he found something heartbreaking in it, and there was something quite surprising about feelings, darkness and held-back anger. It was the opposite of what he'd seen, and that difference really intrigued him.

"For Max, the text is both a psychological narrative and something approaching a dream state, so there is the idea of a changing of scales, where things that are little can become big and vice versa. We do this using puppets, lighting, sound and video, all of which are very important in trying to call upon the subconsciousness of the spectator, and to make the spectator participate in the performance."

Written in 1977, the nine pages of dense monologue that make up Hamletmachine was first produced in France, although it became something of a cause celebre when American director Robert Wilson took it up in 1986. Famous for his stagings of cross-collaborative work by the likes of Philip Glass, Tom Waits and William Burroughs, and, more recently, Rufus Wainwright and Marina Abramovic, Wilson gave Muller's work a mythical, epic edge.

Hamletmachine remains the most performed work of a writer born in what was then East Germany, and whose youthful membership of the Socialist Unity Party and the German Writers Association quickly established him as a major talent while still in his 20s. By 1961, however, his plays were being censored or banned at home, but began to find popularity in the West. It was arguably this division that made his works increasingly less orthodox, predicting society's increasingly fractured state as old ideologies collapsed in on themselves.

Hamletmachine premiered in Paris in 1979. If Wilson's production of Hamletmachine was significant, Muller's own production several years later went further. More than seven hours in length, Hamletmachine was folded into Shakespeare's original as the play within a play that proves so crucial to the plot. Other productions have included a radio version by Einsturzende Neubaten, the German industrial music group whose entire aesthetic was about smashing down old barriers. What Muller did it with words, Einsturzende Neubaten, whose name translates as Collapsing New Buildings, did with noise and something more physical. A 1981 concert at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts ended in chaos when the band attempted to drill through the floor.

Muller's work hasn't been seen much in Scotland. Outside of a production of Quartet by Stewart Laing in the Citizens Theatre's Circle Studio, the only other substantial sighting of Muller in a professional context was more than 20 years ago.

Off The Wall was a week-long series of rehearsed readings and workshop-style productions of new German work at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh under the auspices of playwright Tom McGrath and translator Ella Wildridge. Taking place in 1990, just after the Berlin Wall fell, Off The Wall brought together work by writers from both East and West. Given McGrath's own experiments with dramatic form, the focus was understandably on writers with a similarly radical outlook. One was Tankred Dorst, whose epic Merlin was later staged at the Lyceum. The other was Muller.

The presentation of Hamletmachine at Off The Wall proved controversial after director Michael Batz asked his cast to perform naked apart from giant heads of Stalin and other Communist icons. In a Mulleresque spirit of defiance, the actors refused to strip unless he did likewise. When Batz duly complied the performance went ahead, and Edinburgh discovered Hamletmachine for the first time.

In contrast to Muller's seven-hour approach, the Sans Soucis production lasts a mere 55 minutes. Legoube laughs at the difference, which goes some way to illustrate his notions of scale in his very personal approach to Hamletmachine itself.

"There is a political element in the play," Lennie translates, "that is about the confrontation between communism and capitalism, but it's not the sort of theatre that is there to give the spectators a lesson, or tell them what is good and bad, like Brechtian, didactic theatre. What interests Max is the whole story apart from the political thing. His approach looks more towards imagery concerning the fragility of humanity, what it has become, and is still becoming today.

"Max thinks it is very important today for the public to let itself be surprised, and that they don't have to understand everything. Each person can go away with their own point of view that goes beyond ideological and literary conflicts. In this way, it is the openness of Hamletmachine that makes it so important today."

Hamletmachine is part of Manipulate at the Traverse, Edinburgh, from January 30. www.manipulatefestival.org

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