Skip to main content

Hamletmachine - Heiner Muller Manipulated



“My main interest when I write plays is to destroy things,” wrote 
German iconoclast Heiner Muller, as quoted in Theatremachine, Marc von 
Henning's English-language translation of Muller's most essential 
works. “For thirty years Hamlet for me was an obsession, so I wrote a 
short text, Hamletmachine, with which I tried to destroy Hamlet. German 
history was another obsession, and I tried to destroy this obsession, 
too, that whole complex. I think my strongest impulse is to reduce 
things down to their skeleton, to tear off their skin and their flesh. 
Then I'm finished with them.”

With this in mind, no wonder the two productions of Muller's 
post-modern rewiring of Shakespeare seemed to Max Legoube of French 
puppet theatre company Compangnie Sans Soucis so wrong-headedly 
violent. Legoube's take on things, which opens this year's Manipulate 
visual theatre festival at the Traverse in Edinburgh, aims to redress 
the balance with a ravishing multi-media approach that cuts through 
Muller's brooding dissections of Marxism and feminism to explore the 
frailty of existence in close-up.

“It surprised Max just how aggressive these productions were,” says 
Sans Soucis associate Deborah Lennie, who acts as translator for 
Legoube, who sits beside her as she acts as his mouthpiece. “So when he 
first saw these productions he hated the text. Then when he read the 
text himself, he found something heartbreaking in it, and there was 
something quite surprising about feelings, darkness and held-back 
anger. He found that was completely the opposite of what he'd seen, and 
that difference really intrigued him. That was why he wanted to do it, 
to defend the text, and to find out what was underneath.

“For Max, the text is both a psychological narrative and something 
approaching a dream state, so there is the idea of a changing of 
scales, where things that are little can become big and vice versa, so 
the interior side of the self can be confronted. There is this 
confrontation between the individual and the mass that provokes 
ruptures in the text. We do this using puppets, lighting, sound and 
video, all of which are very important in trying to call upon the 
subconsciousness of the spectator, and to make the spectator 
participate in the performance, to liberate the spectator, and, rather 
than present a conclusion, to open the mind.”

Written in 1977, the nine pages of dense monologues that make up 
Hamletmachine was first produced in France, although it became 
something of a cause celebre when American director Robert Wilson took 
a lavish hi-tech take on things in 1986. Famous for his stagings of 
cross-collaborative work by the likes of Philip Glass, Tom Waits and 
William Burroughs, and, more recently, Rufus Wainwright and Marina 
Abramovic, Wilson gave Muller's work a mythical, epic edge, which, 
three years before the Berlin Wall fell, was already suggesting, if not 
a post-political age, then certainly an era of less certainties. 
'Goodbye to didacticism', Muller wrote in the play's introduction.

Hamletmachine remains the most performed work of a writer born in 
Saxony in what was then East Germany, and whose youthful membership of 
the Socialist Unity Party and the German Writers Association quickly 
established him as a major writer while still in his twenties. By 1961, 
however, his plays were being censored or banned, while Muller was 
effectively expelled from the Writers Association. Paradoxically, 
Muller's work began to find popularity in the west. It was arguably 
this division that made his works increasingly less orthodox, predating 
and predicting society's increasingly fractured state as old ideologies 
collapsed in on themselves.

Hamletmachine itself premiered in Paris in 1979, while English 
translations of some of Muller's other works had trickled across the 
border for several years. If Wilson's production of Hamletmachine 
became iconic in a style that reflected Muller's own tendency to pick 
and mix other texts in a form of literary sampling more common in live 
art collage, Muller's own production several years later went further. 
More than seven hours in length, Hamletmachine itself was folded into 
Shakespeare's original as the play within a play that proves so crucial 
to the Danish Prince's subsequent downfall. Other productions have 
included a radio version by Einsturzende Neubaten, the German 
industrial band whose entire aesthetic, like Muller, was about smashing 
down old barriers. Where Muller did it through words, Einsturzende 
Neubaten, whose name translates as Collapsing New Buildings, went 
beyond metaphor towards something more physical. A 1981 concert at the 
Institute of Contemporary Arts ended in chaos when the band attempted 
to drill a hole in the floor.

Muller's work hasn't been seen much in Scotland. Outside of a 
production of the Dangerous Liaisons-appropriated Quartet by Stewart 
Laing in the Citizens Theatre's Circle Studio, the only other 
substantial sighting of Muller in a professional context was more than 
twenty years ago.

Off The Wall was a week-long series of rehearsed readings and 
workshop-style productions of new German work at the Royal Lyceum 
Theatre in Edinburgh under the auspices of playwright and Literary 
Director for Scotland, the late Tom McGrath and translator Ella 
Wildridge. Taking place in 1990, just a year after the Berlin Wall 
fell, Off The Wall brought together work by writers from both east and 
west. Given McGrath's own experiments with dramatic form, the focus was 
understandably on writers with a similarly radical outlook. One was 
Tankred Dorst, whose epic two-part version of Merlin was later staged 
at the Lyceum. The other was Muller.

The programme of Muller works included an excerpt from Quartet set to a 
soundtrack of one of the previous year's club hits. Somewhat 
presciently called The Power, it was performed by German Eurodance trio 
Snap!, who used (initially unauthorised) samples from Mantronix and 
Jocelyn Brown on a par with the way in which Muller, and indeed Wilson, 
used other sources. Performed in eighteenth century costume, this 
presentation was directed by Marc von Henning.

The presentation of Hamletmachine at Off The Wall proved even more 
irreverent, and not a little controversial after director Michael Batz 
asked his cast to perform naked apart from giant heads of Stalin and 
other Communist icons. In a typically Mulleresque spirit of defiance, 
the actors refused unless he did likewise. With Batz duly complying 
with their wishes, the performance went ahead, and Edinburgh discovered 
Hamletmachine for the first time.

In contrast to Muller's seven-hour approach, Sans Soucis' production 
lasts a mere fifty-five minutes.  Legoube laughs at the difference, 
which goes some way to illustrate his notions of scale in his very 
personal approach to Hamletmachine itself.

“There is a political element in the play,” Lennie translates, “that is 
about the confrontation between communism and capitalism, but it's not 
the sort of theatre that is there to give the spectators a lesson, or 
tell them what is good and bad, like Brechtian, didactic theatre. What 
interests Max is the whole story apart from the political thing. His 
approach looks more towards imagery concerning the fragility of 
humanity, what it has become, and is still becoming today.

Max thinks it is very important today for the public to let itself be 
surprised, and that they don't  have to understand everything. Each 
person can go away with their own point of view that goes beyond 
ideological and literary conflicts. In this way, it is the openness of 
Hamletmachine that makes it so important today.”


Hamletmachine, Manipulate, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, January 30th
www.manipulatefestival.org
www.traverse.co.uk

The Herald, January 24th 2012

ends


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ron Butlin - The Sound of My Voice

When Ron Butlin saw a man who’d just asked him the time throw himself under a train on the Paris Metro, it was a turning point in how his 1987 novel, The Sound Of My Voice, would turn out. Twenty years on, Butlin’s tale of suburban family man Morris Magellan’s existential crisis and his subsequent slide into alcoholism is regarded as a lost classic. Prime material, then, for the very intimate stage adaptation which opens in the Citizens Theatre’s tiny Stalls Studio tonight. “I had this friend in London who was an alcoholic,” Butlin recalls. “He would go off to work in the civil service in the morning looking absolutely immaculate. Then at night we’d meet, and he’s get mega-blootered, then go home and continue drinking and end up in a really bad state. I remember staying over one night, and he’d emerge from his room looking immaculate again. There was this huge contrast between what was going on outside and what was going on inside.” We’re sitting in a café on Edinburgh’s south sid

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) 1. THE STONE ROSES    Don’t Stop ( Silvertone   ORE   1989) The trip didn’t quite start here for what sounds like Waterfall played backwards on The Stone Roses’ era-defining eponymous debut album, but it sounds

Big Gold Dreams – A Story of Scottish Independent Music 1977-1989

Disc 1 1. THE REZILLOS (My Baby Does) Good Sculptures (12/77)  2. THE EXILE Hooked On You (8/77) 3. DRIVE Jerkin’ (8/77) 4. VALVES Robot Love (9/77) 5. P.V.C. 2 Put You In The Picture (10/77) 6. JOHNNY & THE SELF ABUSERS Dead Vandals (11/77) 7. BEE BEE CEE You Gotta Know Girl (11/77) 8. SUBS Gimme Your Heart (2/78) 9. SKIDS Reasons (No Bad NB 1, 4/78) 10. FINGERPRINTZ Dancing With Myself (1/79)  11. THE ZIPS Take Me Down (4/79) 12. ANOTHER PRETTY FACE All The Boys Love Carrie (5/79)  13. VISITORS Electric Heat (5/79) 14. JOLT See Saw (6/79) 15. SIMPLE MINDS Chelsea Girl (6/79) 16. SHAKE Culture Shock (7/79) 17. HEADBOYS The Shape Of Things To Come (7/79) 18. FIRE EXIT Time Wall (8/79) 19. FREEZE Paranoia (9/79) 20. FAKES Sylvia Clarke (9/79) 21. TPI She’s Too Clever For Me (10/79) 22. FUN 4 Singing In The Showers (11/79) 23. FLOWERS Confessions (12/79) 24. TV21 Playing With Fire (4/80) 25. ALEX FERGUSSON Stay With Me Tonight (1980) 1. THE REZILL