Avant-Pop Metadrama Hamlet thing

(((New profile on experimental theatre auteur Elizabeth Lecompte describes her the Wooster's group's recent adaptation of Hamlet.))))

"Experimental Journey" by Jane Kramer
New Yorker, Oct. 8 2007

"The stage is minimal. A modular aluminum frame outlines a few deceptively quiet images: a wheeled armchair; Hamlet sitting in the armchair, reading; three video monitors facing out into the theatre and replacing bits and pieces of the actor and the stage; a wide stepped platform, stage left, and, behind it all, a large movie screen on which the curtain is about to rise on Richard Burton's "Hamlet." This is the look of a LeCompte production just before the world in her aluminum frame splinters into action and refraction--into the constant reconfigurations of illusion that you could call her signature. It happens in seconds here: Hamlet twists himself toward the screen and shouts, "O.K., play that movie!" and what you get for the next three hours is a virtual "downloading" of the film that Burton made of his own stage "Hamlet," in 1964--an attentive, impatient, fiercely disciplined, and comically anarchic return of that famous star turn to the theatre."

"You could describe the 'Hamlet' that opens this month as the culmination of a grand battle between LeCompte and Shakespeare. 'I started out thinking, This is not our language," she says. 'You can't "translate" from his English. It seemed like a fetish to me because I always see texts as objects. They have a solidity--it's not theoretical-- and I don't look for metaphor or analogy or meaning."

Lecompte: "I'm not an intellectual. I am not trying to mean anything--I'm trying to have a good time."

Link


(((I have absolutely no opinion good or bad of this adaptation. I'll have to to see it when it makes the regional circuit. The play's the thing. Go see it.If I was being catty, I'd quote Brendan Behan, tho.)))

I simply must decline,
To dance in the street for Gertude Stein
And as for Alice B. Toklas,
I'd rather keep me Shakespeare
And a box of feckin' choclas'