Hamletmachine

Feb. 22–24, Feb. 28–Mar. 4 @ UGA Cellar Theatre

originally published February 21, 2007

A decade after the establishment of the German Democratic Republic (more commonly known on this side as East Germany), Heiner Müller won the East’s top dramatic prize and established himself as a frontrunner to succeed the recently deceased Bertolt Brecht as the finest dramatist in the whole of Deutschland. A mere two years later, just as construction was beginning on the Wall that would scar Berlin for the better part of the next three decades, Herr Müller found himself on the wrong side of the fickle, communist "arts" establishment, and, by the end of 1961, had lost both the first of many plays to the ruthless censors and his membership in the state’s Writer’s Association.

Over the next dozen years, Müller fought a near-constant (and almost always losing) battle with the authorities to get his bracing, hypnotically innovative works onto the stages of East Berlin and keep them there long enough to have their intended effects. By the late 1970s, he began staging much of his work outside of East Germany - both out of necessity and as a more suitable backdrop for his thematic focus on social decay, the stagnation of Western tradition, and indignation at the paucity of avenues for societal redemption. At the end of the decade, in a decidedly capitalist city less than a hundred kilometers from the Dutch border, he staged what has become his best known work: Die Hamletmaschine.

As the title suggests, Hamletmachine is ostensibly a reinterpretation of the most famous play in the English language. Whereas Shakespeare’s original is famous in large part for its exquisite and infinitely quotable verse, though, Müller’s revision is viciously slight (the English translation rarely runs more than eight pages, as the free script at www.efn.org/~dredmond/Hamletmachine.PDF attests). What it lacks in florid verbal intricacy, however, it more than makes up for in interpretive variability. Indeed, the regular and widely-varied stagings that have taken place since the debut have received the lion’s share of their praise from the ingenious solutions necessary to deal with the peculiar difficulties of such extreme linguistic economy. Cratered with imagery of sexual and ecological decay (the text’s hints at a manmade Ice Age are particularly harrowing), Hamletmachine serves as a kind of mirror in which various groups of theatre troupes can see reflected back their own fears for the world around them.

A decade prior to that debut staging, Del Hamilton, currently Artistic Director of the fantastic 7 Stages Theatre in Atlanta was getting his MFA at UGA. He is returning to the same stages he used to haunt in order to direct University Theatre's particularly intriguing take on Hamletmachine. Alongside members of the Graduate Acting Company, the University’s multimedia Interactive Performance Lab, and PhD candidate Michelle Smith, Hamilton has cast the play’s central focus as the trench warfare within the character of Hamlet himself by concocting and projecting a virtual ‘pal.Hamlet’ onto the stage, alongside the flesh and blood one. The idea is so novel that the International Müller Society has invited Hamilton and Smith to Germany to discuss the work they’ve done. Further, after the show closes in Athens, it will move to 7 Stages for a further weekend.

This arresting new vision of an always mind-bending show plays in the Cellar Theatre of the UGA Fine Arts Building, Feb. 22–24 and Feb. 28–Mar. 3 at 8 p.m. with a Sunday matinee at 2:30 on Mar. 4. Tickets are a paltry $10 with a $2 discount for students and seniors. Call the University Theatre box office at 706-542-2838.

Brandon Waddell