The upcoming premiere of the acclaimed director’s Hamlet in Germany is scheduled for the 9th of March. His production casts the company of the Schauspielhaus in Bochum, and engages two artists from the Teatr Współczesny in Wrocław: Mirek Kaczmarek, who will design the sets, and Maciek Prusak, who will work on choreography.
Jan Klata began working in Germany in 2004, when he traveled to Berlin with his performance Uśmiech grejpfruta (The Smile of a Grapefruit). In 2007 he showed Transfer!, a moving documentary story about the traumatic period of displacements of millions of Germans and Poles in what is now western Poland. The performance involved elderly people relating their youthful experiences and attracted huge interest, opening possibilities of further cooperation for the young Polish director. Klata traveled to Bochum in 2011 with the staging from Kafka’s America. The performance premiered on the 28th of April, and repeated performanced were staged to enthusiastic reviews through to June 2011. In March 2012 the Bochum stage also hosted Klata's version of The Robbers based on the Romantic play by Schiller.
Roman Pawłowski, a journalist for the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper, observed the bravery of Klata staging Schiller, commenting that The Robbers is a classic for German readership and audiences, the equivalent of Mickiewicz’s Forefathers’ Eve for Poles. Such a situation demands the artist’s confrontation both with spectator expectations and with the tradition of staging a classic work. Klata avoided reference to historic German productions of the piece, and The Robbers was hailed a great success.
In an interview for the dwutygodnik.com, the director commented on his international working experience:
Sometimes you can see things better from the outside, you see them differently for sure. This was the reason why we are invited - exotic guests on this continent of German literature. [...] The [German] artistic directors don't assume that there is some kind of a universal repertoire or one mode of function for a municipal theatre. They know that these cities are all different, and the societies that inhabit them are different from one another. [...] It is more about breaking with the idea that a so called high-culture is going to satisfy every audience, from Kielce to Białystok.
Klata’s work was also enjoyed in 2012 by Düsseldorf theatregoers, where he staged Mark Ravenhill’s Shoot/Get Treasure/ Repeat, a play dealing with the fear of western civilisation. Christoph Lepschy, dramaturge with the Schauspielhaus in Düsseldorf, commented on the Polish director’s work,
On the international scene, Klata’s uncompromising stance with respect to social and political reality is of an especially high value. He is appreciated for his form-focused, dance-like and very spectacular vision as a director. We were therefore very happy to pursue this project together with such an effect.
Jan Klata's version of Hamlet premieres in Bochum on the 9th of March, 2013 at 7.30 pm, with repeat performances scheduled for the 15th, 22nd and 31st of March.
Editor: SRS
Source: Dwutygodnik, Gazeta Wyborcza, http://www.schauspielhausbochum.de/