The performace had its premiere showing in 2011, and it was hailed the season’s best staging of Shakespeare and presented with the Grand Prix of Poland’s 14th annual Shakespeare Festival in Gdańsk.
Piotr Szczerski, the artistic director of the Kielce theatre which produced Rychcik’s play, thus commented on the selection of this showing for the Neuss festival:
One of the directors in charge of the German Shakespeare Festival swore he would never stage any more Hamlets, yet, upon seeing Rychcik’s play, he changed his mind. He honoured us with an invitation to this international festival in Neuss, which already has quite a long tradition.
The director Radosław Rychcik comments on his interpretation of the play:
We are not interested in the idea of power within this story. We deal with the system of the family, with the relations inside of the family, and with the trauma of love. I would not want to label this staging as very "contemporary", but it isn’t Elisabethan theatre, either. The musical score is contemporary and electronic music, but numerous elements of the stage design allude to the modernist tradition.
In a review for the Przekrój weekly, Jacek Wakar writes:
Radosław Rychcik is very consequent in reducing the Shakespearian masterpiece to powerful images. He not only cuts out the famous soliloquy, but also many of the standard replicas. There is not Ghost of Hamlet’s Father, no Gravediggers, no Fortinbras – not to mention the minor characters. There is no ‘mouse-trap’, but there is a sequence in which famous movie scenes are enacted. Ophelia’s madness lasts no longer than a minute and it manifests itself with an obsessive fiddling with a Rubik’s cube. One pites the fragments cut out of the original, but in the end, Rychcik’s take on Hamlet is strikingly fresh, especially in the massive amounts of stagings which attempt to confront the classic. And, indeed, the director is also quite though-provoking in the way he approaches the original Hamlet. I am not even disdainful of the way in which he debases the significance of the theme. The performance doesn’t attempt to be an arch-tragedy, it doesn’t try to measure up to the legendary stagings by Wajda, or even Warlikowski, although he quotes the latter.
The performance will be staged on the 26th of June, 2012, at 8 pm, at the Globe Theatre in Neuss. The showing of Hamlet takes place as part of the Klopsztanga 2012 - Polish Cultural Programme in North Rhine-Westphalia.
Prior to the showing, on the 25th of June, the Globe Theatre also hosts a lecture from professor Jerzy Limon, entitled Around the World in 80 minutes. Jerzy Limon is a theatre researcher, writer and the co-founder of Shakespeare Festival Networks, a network of European festivals of which the Neuss events are also a part. During his lecture, Jerzy Limon takes up and analyses one particular scene, selected from Shakespeare’s comedies. He attemps to demonstrate how very scarce means enabled to depict the most complex scenes in Elisabethan theatre, whether the situation to be depicted was the drowining of a ship, or the falling off a cliff. The lecture is crowned with a presentation of the the project for a new Elisabethan stage in Gdańsk.
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Editor: SRS
Source: klopsztanga.de, e-teatr.pl