Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

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Volume 11 Number 3, December 2010

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THOMAS OSTERMEIER'S HAMLET AT KRONBORG CASTLE

 

I sinned against one of Europe's theatre gods this evening

leaving his show halfway through and now I fear the consequences

what must I do to propitiate? How can I ever again be seen as a connoisseur

who's best pleased when things are hard to understand.  But the simple fact is

I was driven by boredom. I could no longer sit and attend to - not

nothing, there was all too much of something

 

I got my 345 Danish Kroner's worth though in the first few minutes

Hamlet's videography at the top projected onto a curtain of see-through

strands as he moved behind it and recorded himself and the five others

in character, followed by the funeral of old Hamlet when the gravedigger

in a Karl Valentin-esque routine ended up in the grave along with the casket

more than once all the while another actor provided bathetic rain via garden hose

and Gertrude waited for a scoopful of earth to throw in.  These lazzi turned

the set's vast steel box of dirt into a sandbox for an evening of fun with death

 

that all stopped as we went to the drunken wedding reception

belching with bursts of hysterical histrionic rage

here was the first instance of contempt mixed with pleasure, that corroding

cocktail dissolvent of souls. But that was it. We never got further.  The rest was

repetition - as if to mock the god Philip Glass.  What Ostermeier seems to have

seen in the play is true and death may reasonably be preferred to being

under the influence of bullshot

 

by the time Ophelia with her little-girl voice entered to reveal

Hamlet's supposed secret love sickness I began my descent

down the bleachers and so from me the rest must be silence

 

- P.K. Brask