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-hourapproach, 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