The Wooster Group's Hamlet
This version of Hamlet, performed by the Wooster Group at lofty St. Ann’s in DUMBO, isn’t for the faint of heart (or brain). Rather, it’s for people interested in exploring the play’s textuality. The play’s the thing, sure, but the play’s also the most culturally significant play in English, which makes staging a novel performance something of a challenge.
Just about everybody knows Hamlet to some degree, so instead of competing with these pre-concieved versions running through the collective mind of the audience, The Wooster Group directly incorporates a few previously staged versions into its particular re-staging. In other words, the group makes concrete a process which tends to occur both individually and subconsciously. When we watch a play like Hamlet, we don’t just watch the actors on stage, but we also think about all the ways Hamlet has seeped into our culture and/or consider the other versions we’ve seen. The Wooster Group simply wants to do some of this work for us, even as it also wants to entertain.
Let me explain: In 1964, Richard Burton was filmed performing the title role during a dress rehearsal in front of a live audience on Broadway. The result was then simultaneously broadcast into theaters around the country over a period of one week—an experiment known as Theatrofilm.
Forty-three years later, the Wooster Group has decided to use Burton’s movie as the centerpiece of its version of Hamlet. The group’s play is performed on the same minimal stage as in the movie, which plays on a large screen behind the actors. The catch? The actors in the movie have been digitally distorted or erased to make way for the actors on the stage to perform. As a result, the live actors mimic exactly the actors in the movie, moving fast when the movie moves fast (Claudius is especially good at fast-forwarding himself), slowing down when the movie slows down, etc. To indicate close ups, the actors rush to the front of the stage, dragging the furniture with them. To speed up the movie, they shout at the sound guys to fast forward. When the live actors perform a scene that wasn’t in the movie, the word “unrendered” appears on the screen.
But these aren’t the only ways Wooster’s Hamlet tries to build upon centuries of past performances. A creepy Charlton Heston plays the Player on screen, taken not from Burton’s version but from Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 Hamlet. The television monitors watched by the live actors echo Ethan Hawke’s futuristic Hamlet (2000). Sometimes Laertes sings ballads while other characters hold lighters aloft, which stresses the malleability of Shakespeare’s words: give it a little thought, and the seventeenth-century verse can be performed any way you want it to be. And I like the way The Wooster Group thinks.
Just about everybody knows Hamlet to some degree, so instead of competing with these pre-concieved versions running through the collective mind of the audience, The Wooster Group directly incorporates a few previously staged versions into its particular re-staging. In other words, the group makes concrete a process which tends to occur both individually and subconsciously. When we watch a play like Hamlet, we don’t just watch the actors on stage, but we also think about all the ways Hamlet has seeped into our culture and/or consider the other versions we’ve seen. The Wooster Group simply wants to do some of this work for us, even as it also wants to entertain.
Let me explain: In 1964, Richard Burton was filmed performing the title role during a dress rehearsal in front of a live audience on Broadway. The result was then simultaneously broadcast into theaters around the country over a period of one week—an experiment known as Theatrofilm.
Forty-three years later, the Wooster Group has decided to use Burton’s movie as the centerpiece of its version of Hamlet. The group’s play is performed on the same minimal stage as in the movie, which plays on a large screen behind the actors. The catch? The actors in the movie have been digitally distorted or erased to make way for the actors on the stage to perform. As a result, the live actors mimic exactly the actors in the movie, moving fast when the movie moves fast (Claudius is especially good at fast-forwarding himself), slowing down when the movie slows down, etc. To indicate close ups, the actors rush to the front of the stage, dragging the furniture with them. To speed up the movie, they shout at the sound guys to fast forward. When the live actors perform a scene that wasn’t in the movie, the word “unrendered” appears on the screen.
But these aren’t the only ways Wooster’s Hamlet tries to build upon centuries of past performances. A creepy Charlton Heston plays the Player on screen, taken not from Burton’s version but from Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 Hamlet. The television monitors watched by the live actors echo Ethan Hawke’s futuristic Hamlet (2000). Sometimes Laertes sings ballads while other characters hold lighters aloft, which stresses the malleability of Shakespeare’s words: give it a little thought, and the seventeenth-century verse can be performed any way you want it to be. And I like the way The Wooster Group thinks.
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