Poland is Hamlet. Why has Hamlet in particular and Shakespeare in general gained such prominenc
Poland is Hamlet. Why has Hamlet in particular and Shakespeare in general gained such prominence in the Polish imagination? In this blog Professor Tony Howard ( (University of Warwick) reflects on this question. Hear more from Tony on 4 July where he will speak as part of Wyspiański: Hamlet Study and The Death of Ophelia. Hamlet sits amongst the drinkers, trying to avoid their hostile stares and the raucous singing. He must concentrate on his thoughts. In this tiny space it is impossible to ignore the fact that Hamlet, almost in the laps of the spectators, wears the striped trousers of a Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz.Hamlet paces amongst us in her dressing room, her pale face reflected in the make-up mirror. She looks out onto the stage of Krakow’s legendary Stary Theatre, where Claudius and his court are shouting reassuring platitudes out into the auditorium - which is empty. Hamlet pulls herself together, preparing to take on the suicidal role for which she feels unfitted. Outside the theatre, in the ‘real’ world, Communism is collapsing.Hamlet hacks at golf balls as the crowd enters the Gdansk shipyard where, over twenty years ago, Solidarity was born and the Cold War ended. Suddenly the abandoned post-industrial buildings echo with the clatter of horseshoes. Suddenly a siren sounds and the spotlights find Ophelia floating in the dark water. Inside, Claudius smilingly teaches his friends the right pronunciation of European wines.These are scenes from three legendary productions – or rather, perhaps, three investigations of Shakespeare’s tragedy - performed in modern Poland. They date from 1964, 1991 and 2004 and were directed respectively by Jerzy Grotowski, Andzej Wajda and Jan Klata. There will be a chance for UK audiences to see fragments of those extraordinary stagings at Shakespeare’s Globe on Wednesday 26 June at the start of the Shakespeare and Poland Festival - when leading directors (including Jan Klata) and academics come together to talk about the profound and passionate relationship between that country and that play. However brief, those clips will hint at what we’ve been missing.‘It is Poland that in our time has come closest to the tumult, the damage, the intensity, the imaginativeness and the daily involvement with the social process that made life so horrible, subtle and ecstatic to an Elizabethan. So it is quite naturally up to a Pole to point us the way.’Peter Brook, 1964The Pole in question here was the critic Jan Kott. For Brook was introducing Kott’s new book Shakespeare Our Contemporary, which revolutionised the way we think about the plays onstage, so that we now take it for granted that every time we see them performed, they are speaking to us - and speaking about us and our hopes and anxieties – here and now.Jan Kott wrote of one play in particular: ‘Hamlet’ is like a sponge. Unless it is produced in a stylised or antiquarian fashion, it immediately absorbs all the problems of our time.’ His chapter on Hamlet focused on a Polish performance just after the end of Stalinism (Stalin hated this play, of course, this study of tyranny, repression and stifled protest). Here, Kott wrote, here on the public stage was what Hamlet meant in 1956, there and then: ‘It was a political drama. Everybody, without exception, was being consistently watched… unequivocally and with a terrifying clarity.’ After a decade, the censorship had relaxed little and - as soon as the tragedy could be performed again in Poland - it was holding the mirror up to its times.When in 1965 the Royal Shakespeare Company staged Hamlet, the programme included a poem by Zbigniew Herbert, who remembered only too clearly how Hitler and Stalin had fought to the death to rule over Poland - and who knew that Fortinbras isn’t a Saviour: ‘Adieu prince I have tasks’, he tells Hamlet’s corpse: ‘I must also elaborate a better system of prisons/since as you justly said Denmark is a prison.’1964, 1991, 2004: Those great productions by Grotowski, Wajda and Klata showed how the spaces that Hamlet is acted in are part of its meaning, and that environment is history. They showed how rehearsals can become intense journeys of exploration for all those involved, both the actors and the audience: psychological, ethical, generational…. Journeys of conscience, journeys towards new conceptions of identity, gender and race.Hamlet asks a soldier where Fortinbras’s army is marching. ‘Some part of Poland’ is the reply. Where are we headed - here and now, on the verge of regime change, in Summer 2019? Can Hamlet or history ‘point us the way’?With Barbara Bogoczek,Tony has translated Stanislaw Wyspianski’s seminal book, The Hamlet Study and The Death of Ophelia, published by Shakespeare’s Globe. Extracts – English premieres - will be staged in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on 4 July in Wyspiański: Hamlet Study and The Death of Ophelia. -- source link
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