Hamletmachine 2

Emerging from the importance of continuing the research which started in 2008 on the text of Hamletmachine, that explores the features of contemporary tragedy murmuring to us from beneath the ruins of ideologies, which we inherited as a burden and still seep into our bones, Hamletmachine 2 appears in 2010 in a different form to question, yet again, the value of the performer's position and action on stage in confronting the reality of failures and loss.
In 2009 we had attempted through our treatment of the text to explore the non-linearity of the narration through the action. Trying to touch upon the story in the non-narrative writing that Heiner Muller's deconstructed text proposes. In this new round of research we were able to draw a clearer line of the development of the story lurking behind the hidden linguistic twists that fill the condensed nine pages of this contemporary tragedy that Muller wrote over the course of more than twenty years, during the period when the capitalist / communist conflict was at its peak. This year, the threads of the narrative which we were able to gather on the dramaturgical level of our research on the text, clarified the foundation on which last year's work was based, which dealt with the role of the actor on stage under the burden of the history we inherited which represents the ruins of revolutions and dreams based on the ruins of power structures and ideologies thrown out by the sea to our shores. Here, the performer of Hamlet is burdened with the history of collapses, failures and depressions, after each war he carries his body and faces his dispersed self in the roles which he performs onstage. His position is his revolution; even if it's a damaged revolution or a "petrification of a hope", it still is an undeniable privilege.
The work, considered as an attempt to touch upon the traits of the contemporary theatrical tragedy, does not imitate the human being's existential crisis from the angle of the classical metaphysical fatality, but the human being's crisis in a present charged with disasters inherited from a politicized disfigured past, it is the tragedy of history, or the tragedy of history's present. The position of the performer with regards to that tragedy whose characters he/she plays onstage, becomes a stand from these characters, from theater and its audience...

Presentation dates and locations:

Hamletmachine 2 was shown on the in September 2010 at the Sunflower Theater, Beirut and in January 2012 at Carthage International Theater Festival, Tunisia.