Translated material
Over the grave in the rain
"Hamlet" by Thomas Ostermeier at the Avignon Festival
The production of Hamlet by the German Thomas Ostermeier, one of the main icons of the new generation of directors, who several years ago already served as artistic director of the Avignon Festival, is the peak of the show. The play, produced by the Berlin theater "Schaubühne" in co-production with Avignon, was played in the gigantic courtyard of honor of the papal palace, designed for three thousand seats, but it was impossible to get tickets there - I saw how a journalist who had specially arrived for one day from Strasbourg; There was only one answer - there are no places.Ostermeier was in Moscow only once: to the NET festival he brought a combination of two productions: the tough and at the same time glamorous, sharply modernized “Nora” and the piercing, almost naturalistic and wordless “Concert on Requests”. The performances were striking in their perfect ordering and intelligibility: the director always knew what he wanted to say, his thoughts were clear and stated directly.
It is amazing that in Hamlet Ostermeyer seemed to abandon all this at once; preserving the skill of a forty-year-old artist, he created a performance that was emotionally almost teenage - inconsiderate, ragged, inarticulate, disheveled, with a frantic rush of energy, resentment and even tears. In an interview, the director said that he wanted the prince to gradually lose his mind by the end of the play from the lies and hypocrisy that surround him, and, probably, as a result of this, the further the play went, the more the play went haywire along with the hero.
But “Hamlet” began clearly and very strongly - like the story of a man still trying to maintain calm. King's funeral. A small funeral procession (only six people participate in the performance), drowning in clay, moves towards the prepared grave. Jacket-and-tie characters in gray raincoats, Gertrude in the guise of a film star like Catherine Deneuve (platinum blonde in sunglasses covering half her face), leaning with mournful languor on the hand of the bearded Claudius. In scenes like these from classic films, it's supposed to be raining: one of the procession runs back to let it rain with a hose, the rest open black umbrellas. This is how it will continue to be: absolute theatrical conventions and playing with cliches are combined with complete acting authenticity and support it in an amazing way.
The courtier runs to the grave, at which there is already a coffin covered with polyethylene, the legs part in the wet mud, the coffin falls on its side, the guide ropes slip out, and the coffin collapses ugly into the hole along with the courtier. He tries to get out, push out the coffin, do everything according to the rules, fusses, slides in the rain and falls again under the indifferent glances of people with umbrellas. Some of the Russian spectators here recalled the fall of the coffin at Brezhnev’s funeral.
The grave of Hamlet's father, covered with earth, will remain on the proscenium, and a stage with a long table and a curtain of gold chains will move across the earthen field, either approaching the audience, or again leaving into the depths. The curtain parted - on the stage was the wedding of Claudius and Gertrude. The slender queen in a white trouser suit, a veil and the usual dark glasses behaves, fawns over the king and sings something in French with a breath. Claudius, wearing a bow tie, takes the microphone in his hands and formally thanks everyone. Overweight, puffy, with a pear-shaped figure, Hamlet sloppily and greedily eats some kind of rubbish from a disposable plate.
Playwright Marius von Mayenburg, who has worked with Ostermeier for a long time and has already rewritten Ibsen’s “Nora” for him, made a modernized version of “Hamlet” - rough and simplified, but preserving the structure of the original. Nothing is lost, but the speed with which one character turns into another, and then into a third, makes the audience's head spin. Having removed her wig and glasses, the diva Gertrude turns out to be a thin, young, loving Ophelia with a girlish ponytail. The self-confident, stupid Hansik Laertes turns into a cowardly Rosencrantz, the pot-bellied glutton Horatio turns into Guildenstern, and then into the Actor, the tiny narcissistic fool Polonius into Osric. Moreover, at some point the characters even stop changing costume details back and forth, explaining what role they are in now. It doesn’t matter anymore - all the faces dancing around Hamlet merge into a solid crowd.
Only Hamlet (Lars Eidinger) remains himself - a flabby, stale giant with long hair and early baldness, irritable and unpleasant. He plays the fool endlessly: he grunts, barks and, running into the hall, pesters the audience. He grimaces and mocks: then suddenly, imitating the host of the concert, he jumps up on the table and demands the audience to support him (“E-e-e!” - the three-thousand-strong audience readily screams). Then, instead of answering Claudia’s question, he collapses, like a man cut down, face first into the dirt, onto his father’s grave. Then, having agreed to participate in a duel with Laertes, he goes against the sword with a plastic fork, and seeing that a serious fight is required, he grabs a shovel.
This Hamlet does not look up from the peephole of the video camera, and what he sees is projected in large blurry pictures onto a curtain of swaying chains. Here is a meeting with the shadow of his deceased father: Hamlet is at the camera, and Horatio raises the head of Claudius towards him, who, after the wedding dinner, fell face-first into the vinaigrette. And this huge face, all covered in red, as if bloody smudges, becoming the face of a dead king, speaks from the screen to his son, then turning into a skull, then again acquiring human features. Here is the death of Ophelia: somewhere there, on the stage, a girl almost invisible behind the jingling chains is wrapped in plastic, and on the screen we see her thrown back face in a wreath and her hands hitting the glare of the film, as if the surface of the water closing over the drowned woman. Everything is conditional: Hamlet took a sip and spat red juice in Claudius’s face - it flows down the usurper’s face, meaning that he is killed. Even the thickness of the prince turns out to be unreal - while portraying the queen in The Mousetrap, Hamlet in a wig, stockings and lace panties, to everyone's amazement, looks like a completely slender young man, but before he climbs back into his wide trousers with suspenders, he In front of the public, he puts on a jumpsuit with theatrical “thickness” and even asks someone to button it up at the back.
The performance is passionate, energetic, assertive, full of wonderful details, but does not coalesce into a coherent story. And yet I want to remember it scene by scene, to unravel it, trying to see if one thing fits into the other. God knows, maybe when “Hamlet” will be played in the small Berlin hall of the Schaubühne theater and the artists will not have to make their way to the audience through stadium distances, everything will somehow link up and come together. Omsk viewers have a chance to check this out - they say Hamlet will come to them this fall. And in the fall they promise to bring us another performance by Ostermeier - “The Marriage of Maria Braun” based on Fassbinder will come to the Stanislavsky Season festival.