The Wooster Group

Hamlet


The avant-garde New York theatre company returns to the Athens Festival with its famous production of Hamlet.


“Every Hamlet has a book in his hand. But what is today’s Hamlet reading?”, asks Jan Kott. Hamlet (1601), “contains an erotic tragedy, a tragedy familial, national, philosophical, eschatological and metaphysical”, and directors can choose between them at will. There’s one proviso, though: “they need to know what they’re choosing and why”.


The Wooster Group treats Shakespeare’s masterpiece as a palimpsest; as such, revisiting the sounds and images of older interpretations through the filter of audio-visual technology, they offer a Hamlet which is “absolutely contemporary, but also utterly faithful to the original”. The actors interact with images from the past on on-stage monitors, and our contemporary Prince soliloquizes in tandem with Richard Burton: “to be or not to be?”. [D.K.]


In English with Greek surtitles


Production Manager Bozkurt Karasu

A Wooster Group / 30th Festival de Barcelona Grec – Institut de Cultura, Ajuntament de Barcelona co-production