Two Hamlets: Wooster Group and Synetic Theater

Perhaps more than any of Shakespeare's other plays, Hamlet carries with it the weight of its past performance history. Different viewers will identify different productions as their definitive experience of the play, but almost all viewers (and actors and directors) come to a performance of Hamlet with resonances of the past. It is a play taught frequently to high school and undergraduate students, and taught increasingly alongside filmed and staged productions of the play. There is surely very little blank slate left for the play's reception—a condition that reinforces Hamlet's central obsession with remembering and its querying of the present's relationship to the past. The play is full of sons called upon to avenge their fathers, and yet that vengeance is so rooted in the past that it threatens the future—which of the play's revenging sons are left alive to carry on their father's legacy? It's a danger both for Hamlet and for the actors playing his role.

The Wooster Group's Hamlet makes this pull of the theatrical past the main thrust of its production. The Wooster Group takes as its starting point not Shakespeare's play, but Richard Burton's 1964 film of the Broadway production of the play directed by John Gielgud and starring Burton as Hamlet. It's a crucial difference in origin, and one that starts to explain both the Wooster Group's performance and the newspaper critics' puzzled responses to that performance. The "Program Note" accompanying the fall 2007 Public Theater production (the play was also workshopped in spring 2007 at St. Ann's Warehouse in New York) provides basic information about the Burton experiment—filmed in live performance with seventeen cameras and shown for only two days in movie theaters across the country in a simultaneous performance of "Theatrofilm" via "the miracle of Electronovision." It goes on to assert that this production "attempts to reverse the process, reconstructing a hypothetical theatre piece from the fragmentary evidence of the edited film, like an archeologist inferring a temple from a collection of ruins. Channeling the ghost of the legendary 1964 performance, we descend into a kind of madness, intentionally replacing our own spirit with the spirit of another."¹

Setting themselves up as a kind of Hamlet, pursuing the ghost of the past in the hopes that it will free us from our inaction, the Wooster Group members seem to invite viewers to see them as vessels that hope to be temporarily filled with Burton's greatness. (Indeed, this is how many reviewers responded to the show, inevitably criticizing the members of the company for imagining they could reproduce Burton's power.) But the "Technical Note" that follows the "Program Note" shows how much more complicated their production is. Rather than reenacting the film, the Wooster Group actors have altered the very thing that they describe as their origin: "We have digitally reedited the Burton film so that the lines of verse, which were spoken freely in the 1964 production, are delivered according to the original poetic meter. In the projection on the back screen, some figures have been erased or obscured, and the duration of the play is shortened using fast forward and jump cuts."² With their insistence on "the original poetic meter," it is hard not to observe that there is no origin here; they have reshaped the very artifact that they claim to reconstruct.

The process of shaping and reshaping happens in front of the audience during the process of performance. The stage set is dominated by the large film screen hanging upstage; this is the screen on which the remediated Burton film is projected throughout the show. When the audience walks into the Public Theater, the screen is blank, except for the word "STOP" in the upper corner. Downstage left are low risers, center stage is a chair facing a video camera and a monitor, and stage right is a small video screen. The set, of course, mirrors the set of the Burton production. When Scott Shepherd walks on stage (dressed in rehearsal clothes, like Burton: black shirt...