Hamlet performed at Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz (review)

Urs Jucker’s Claudius confessed “my offense is rank” (3.3.36) through a handheld microphone, ditching the stage and ascending the steps of an aisle in the stalls. He carefully examined the consequences of his actions, both in this world and the hereafter, in the midst of an audience with whom he communicated directly. His delivery was sincere and unadorned, a moment of breathtaking simplicity in a production of heart-pounding theatricality. Director Thomas Ostermeier broke the fourth wall in order to take us inside the mind and soul of Shakespeare’s afflicted villain.

In act five of the same production, Lars Eidinger’s Hamlet asked Laertes for forgiveness in a speech the actor underlined as key. Identifying his own madness as the agent that wronged Laertes, this Hamlet took his time genuinely to discover each agonized step in the logic that revealed how he himself was “of the faction that is wronged. / His madness is poor Hamlet’s enemy” (5.2.175–6). He then instructed the deputy stage manager to raise the auditorium lights and, after shaking hands with Laertes, jumped down from the stage to roam the auditorium, blowing raspberries at startled spectators as he thrust imaginary rapiers into their chests. As Hamlet’s distraction furiously returned, and the boundary between a performed madness and its reality broke down, this production dismantled the fourth wall a second time. Anarchic gestures such as these led reviewers to attest to a powerful affectivedynamic in a “thrilling” performance that taxed, affronted, and exhilarated audiences.

Indeed, the presentation of Ostermeier’s 2008 German language Hamletat the Barbican in 2011 became a significant cultural moment. Both critics and practitioners saw the production as a radical, confrontational act, contesting the tired representational strategies of a sclerotized form of social realism endemic in British theater and its approach to Shakespeare. Director Ramin Grey urged the RSC to headhunt Ostermeier as Michael Boyd’s replacement: “Like the theatrical equivalent of the Eurozone Greeks, we need a German bailout now” (qtd. in Charlotte Higgins’s Arts Diary, Guardian6 Dec. 2011, web). Far from contesting the hegemonic logic of British theatrical production, however, Ostermeier’s Hamletactually recastfamiliar realistic representational strategies, albeit in often provocative ways. This production challenged aesthetic conventions whilst structuring an identification with Shakespeare’s text that remained compatible with a realist framework. In fact, Ostermeier’s underlying realist proclivities reveal why his work, invited to the Barbican four times since 2004, is so fêted in the UK.

The giant playground in which Ostermeier’s actors roamed, designed by his frequent collaborator Jan Pappelbaum, offered a visual demonstration of how Ostermeier’s aesthetic transcends, and yet reinvests in, realism. Three components made up this Hamletenvironment. Firstly, in a choice reminiscent of Pina Bausch’s Rite of Spring, a pit of soil covered the stage and, as became clear in the first ten minutes, functioned as old King Hamlet’s graveyard. A giant gold beaded-metal curtain trucked upstage and downstage on runners at either side of this earth-covered playing space, foregrounding theatricality as a central, mobile metaphor; Hamlet staged his “antic disposition” to a Court in which the boundaries between reality and performance kept shifting. Finally, a wedding banquet table, also able to truck upstage and downstage over the graveyard, made manifest Hamlet’s declaration that “the funeral baked meats / Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables” (1.2.179–80). Just as Pappelbaum concretized the forces that exert psychological pressure on the protagonist, Ostermeier had his actors interact with the set in ways that actualized the constellation of character psychology and emotional realism...