Post by Steve on May 21, 2016 0:24:59 GMT
Caught this at the Royal Court. It's a striking memorable response to Hamlet, but it rings less true than Hamlet does, and it's a lot less entertaining.
Spoilers follow. . .
I remember being taken to Bristol Zoo as a child, and being both mesmerised and horrified by the polar bear enclosure. The polar bears were completely and utterly mad, their heads freakishly jerking and twisting, as they paced pointlessly from side to side over concrete, avoiding the sparkling blue pools of water that they were supposed to swim in, as if they had rabies.
Katie Mitchell suggests Ophelia's life is like that enclosure. She confines it to a room ("zimmer" means "room" apparently), in which Ophelia (Jenny Konig, huge luminous despairing eyes inside a tiny head) sits either on the right sewing, or on the left, gazing into nothingness, pacing from side to side between these two points. Periodically, cassette tapes from Hamlet are delivered, in which Hamlet either obsesses over Ophelia's wet private parts, or just tells her to eff off repeatedly. A friendly maid visits frequently, but bar holding Ophelia's hand, never makes conversation with her, nor does Ophelia converse back.
At the halfway point, Hamlet, who has been confined to the top right of the room, out of Ophelia's eyeline, doing foley effects which echo around the auditorium, enters and screams in Ophelia's face, whereupon he dances maniacally to "Love will Tear us apart" by Joy Division, a freaky dance that is less convincing and more laborious than the quirky dance in "The Flick."
Needless to say, things get much worse for Ophelia, and the enclosure that is her stage fills with water. . .
The effect is hypnotic and sears itself into the consciousness. Men make prisons of women's lives, says the play, and Hamlet is an abuser, as is Claudius.
However, this play's characterisation of Hamlet departs from the facts of the play it purports to comment on. When in Hamlet, Ophelia says "[Hamlet] hath importun'd me with love in honourable fashion and hath given countenance to his speech with almost all the holy vows of heaven," that doesn't much equate to the foul abuse Hamlet spouts here.
Further, this production has nothing to say about the juggernaut of injustice that leads to Hamlet being abusive to Ophelia in the first place (aka the behaviour of Gertrude, his faithless mother, which he unfairly imports to all women), which allows us to understand it, but not condone it.
Worst of all, this production asserts an existence for Ophelia that is not credible: why does this Ophelia not make conversation with her maid, her obvious ally, but instead sit in stony silence for hours on end staring into space?
This lack of faithfulness to the material being commented on, as well as the unreality of the behaviour presented, makes for a play that presents less "truth" about Ophelia in it's one hour fifty minutes running time than Shakespeare packs into his fifteen minutes or so of Ophelia's actual stage time in Hamlet.
The production is prescient, however, about the mistreatment of women generally, through the ages, as well as prescient about the mistreatment of polar bears at Bristol Zoo.
3 stars
Spoilers follow. . .
I remember being taken to Bristol Zoo as a child, and being both mesmerised and horrified by the polar bear enclosure. The polar bears were completely and utterly mad, their heads freakishly jerking and twisting, as they paced pointlessly from side to side over concrete, avoiding the sparkling blue pools of water that they were supposed to swim in, as if they had rabies.
Katie Mitchell suggests Ophelia's life is like that enclosure. She confines it to a room ("zimmer" means "room" apparently), in which Ophelia (Jenny Konig, huge luminous despairing eyes inside a tiny head) sits either on the right sewing, or on the left, gazing into nothingness, pacing from side to side between these two points. Periodically, cassette tapes from Hamlet are delivered, in which Hamlet either obsesses over Ophelia's wet private parts, or just tells her to eff off repeatedly. A friendly maid visits frequently, but bar holding Ophelia's hand, never makes conversation with her, nor does Ophelia converse back.
At the halfway point, Hamlet, who has been confined to the top right of the room, out of Ophelia's eyeline, doing foley effects which echo around the auditorium, enters and screams in Ophelia's face, whereupon he dances maniacally to "Love will Tear us apart" by Joy Division, a freaky dance that is less convincing and more laborious than the quirky dance in "The Flick."
Needless to say, things get much worse for Ophelia, and the enclosure that is her stage fills with water. . .
The effect is hypnotic and sears itself into the consciousness. Men make prisons of women's lives, says the play, and Hamlet is an abuser, as is Claudius.
However, this play's characterisation of Hamlet departs from the facts of the play it purports to comment on. When in Hamlet, Ophelia says "[Hamlet] hath importun'd me with love in honourable fashion and hath given countenance to his speech with almost all the holy vows of heaven," that doesn't much equate to the foul abuse Hamlet spouts here.
Further, this production has nothing to say about the juggernaut of injustice that leads to Hamlet being abusive to Ophelia in the first place (aka the behaviour of Gertrude, his faithless mother, which he unfairly imports to all women), which allows us to understand it, but not condone it.
Worst of all, this production asserts an existence for Ophelia that is not credible: why does this Ophelia not make conversation with her maid, her obvious ally, but instead sit in stony silence for hours on end staring into space?
This lack of faithfulness to the material being commented on, as well as the unreality of the behaviour presented, makes for a play that presents less "truth" about Ophelia in it's one hour fifty minutes running time than Shakespeare packs into his fifteen minutes or so of Ophelia's actual stage time in Hamlet.
The production is prescient, however, about the mistreatment of women generally, through the ages, as well as prescient about the mistreatment of polar bears at Bristol Zoo.
3 stars
